Where the hell is Lara??
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?
Comment by Jon in Michigan
Thursday December 01 2005 @ 3:16 pm
Oh so very cool, Lara. Somehow its both cool and cruel to have training start in the winter. On the one hand, its totally kickass hardcore to be out there running in the winter time. On the other hand, it totally SUCKS to be out there running in the wintertime.
Speaking as someone who has completely lost their training base, you just got to go out and do what you say your are going to do. Just run and don’t think about it. I ran. I ran all this week. It was amazing. I could feel all the extra jiggling (which was gross) but I was happy to be moving.