Running In Place

Dear RBF,
I am alive. I am well. I am running. More to come – on my honor.
Love, Lara

P.S. Jack and Kurt tagged me for “5 random things,” so here goes:

1) I am 5′ 11″ – and the shortest person on my dad’s side of the family. Dad is 6′ 6″, Gram was 6′ tall, aunts and uncle all around 6′, and all my cousins are over 6′ – including one over 7′ tall. (Also, there’s multiple twins in the family – fortunately, none are mine!).

2) My mom died when she was 49 and I was 23. That sucked. It’s been 15 years and sometimes I still can cry fresh tears for her.

3) My vision is frightfully bad. I have worn glasses (and later contact lenses) since kindergarten. Without my corrective lenses, the world is a literal blur – not just fuzzy, but unidentifiable unless I can hold it within 5 inches of my face.

4) I love books! I buy them compulsively. I keep forbidding myself from getting more books until I make a dent in the ones I have, but every time I step foot in a bookstore (which I always find some excuse to do) I get something else. Right now I have a stack of 8 books on the nightstand waiting for my attention. I also listen to audiobooks any time I’m in my car.

5) I was arrested and spent a night in county jail once. It was nearly the whole nine yards – handcuffed, searched, flame orange uniform, bail. No hot girlfights in the communal showers though. Sorry.

Gosh it’s fun to be random! I think this meme has nearly made the rounds but I would like to tag Jack M. because maybe he would like a litte randomness too (try it — you’ll like it!).

I hope everyone’s holidays were so awesome and that the new year will be likewise. I can’t help but get sucked into the ‘New Year – New Start’ thing and it’s so fun! I could make a new start on any thing at any moment, but to save it all up for that specific instant of supposed rebirth is such a great ritual! I totally embrace that and am biding my time – formulating my super secret plan wherein all things good and virtuous are on hold and need not actually begin until 12:01 am, 1/01/2006. Cheers!

I’m so far gone, I don’t even know where I’m at! Actually, that’s not so true. I think I have pretty much gotten my feet back under me and am moving in a direction again. Since late September I had been struggling a little with motivation, but I was still getting out there. However, in the past 4 weeks – since I started the new job – I have really disconnected from running – managing only a handful of runs in a month’s time. Not only have I been mostly uninterested in running, I’ve been disinclined to read or talk much about running. I wonder to myself, am I not a runner anymore? Or was I never a runner to begin with, that I could cast it aside so easily? In truth, it’s not cast aside. It’s always kind of on the fringes, like your passive/aggressive friend who apprears to deflect attention while actually soliciting it. Quietly insisting.

But man, once you let yourself fall out – it’s hard. Once you say, a few times in a row, I’m not going for a run, I’m going to eat chips and watch Days of Our Lives (um, not me, per se, that’s just a completely and totally fabricated example of some other person who might care if Marlena will recover from her amnesia and realize that John is the love of her life even though she just miscarried Roman’s baby and is still married to Alex, or if Belle really did – somehow – have Sean’s baby instead of Philip’s [and where does that leave Mimi??], or if…well never mind, I don’t know anything about this stuff!). Now, I am, mostly unashamedly, a Type B personality with a little extra lazy thrown in for good measure – so the notion of me sitting back with my feet up is not surprising or upsetting in itself. It’s the nagging that’s new – the voice in my brain that’s telling me that I can’t go back to the hammock – that I have to keep moving. But even so, a crisis in motivation is not necessarily resolved by a lightning strike of strength and purpose – it would be nice – but it mostly comes down to the nitty gritty of investing in something other than the idea of guilty pleasure (which, if it involves chips & Days of Our Lives, only lasts an hour anyway – unless you watch Dr. Phil too).

So ultimately, I didn’t come round to talk about how I’ve not been running, but how I have. How I’ve discovered just how much you can lose by letting too much time lapse between runs. How I’m learning that sometimes you have to fake it till you make it and put your sneakers on and make them walk you out the door and onto the trail – all while pretending to yourself that you’re not really going for a run. How I’m remembering that I truly do enjoy running in wintery weather (though the snow & cold are sporadic yet). How I’ve made a plan that starts me off on marathon training right around the beginning of the new year. And how freakin’ cool is that?