The Game of "Life"

Many times I’ve heard people say, “I want to eat right and exercise, but I can’t do it now because ________.”  And that blank has been filled with anything from “it’s a tough week at work,” to “I don’t want to start if the day of the week ends in a ‘y’,” and everything in between.  I know this, because almost all the excuses for not eating well and working out came from me.  I’ve come up with everything.  I remember my most favorite ploy of all: “Well, I hate to work out alone, so I should join a gym, but I can’t join a gym because of all the people there.”  Now, who can argue with that logic?

The last several days have been everything from tricky to downright challenging.  First, I traveled again for work, this time to New Bern, NC.  Never heard of it?  Yeah, that’s because it barely exists.  It actually does have an airport – that can handle a total of two planes at a time, and to give you an idea of how small the planes are, when we were leaving New Bern the flight attendant asked out loud, “Can someone in the first 2 rows please move to row 10 or 11?  The front of the plane is too heavy.”  Sitting in seat 2D, I jumped up like my ass was on fire, and when she thanked me for volunteering, my reply was “Anything I can do to keep the plane – up.”  Anyway, I am ALWAYS nervous presenting to a crowd, and at these wellness summits we do I do 3 different presentations, so I got to be nervous 3 times in about 8 hours.  Again, I was with the ex-coach, and I don’t want to get into it again, but let’s just say that he’s still a [bad word, nickname for “Richard”].  Also, I quickly learned that in the Deep South, a “healthy” breakfast is biscuits and gravy, and vegetables are specialty items on the menus – when you can find them.

I also had to deal with two family stressors, one medical and the other – umm, political.  Fortunately, there are surgeons who can fix the medical problem, but the other one has been left up to family to deal with, and if your family is anything like mine, then you’d know that we haven’t dealt with it well and it’s coming to an apex.  And sadly, this apex hit at my niece’s 10^th birthday party, and though everyone behaved and let my niece have her day, the elephant in the room was taking up all the space.

Finally, I had to do a 20 mile run today.  I know, I did one last year.  But that’s just it.  I did just one.  This year I’m using a different training plan that calls for three 20 milers, and this is the first.  So, the problem is that I knew how much it was going to hurt, and I also knew that I was going to have to inflict the same pain on myself 2 more times before I even got to the marathon itself.

So, how did I do?  Well, if I say so myself, I was not too shabby.  On my trip, I used my own trick of always choosing the healthiest items that I could, which on this trip meant that I ate so much fish that the living ones in the ocean near me got a little nervous.  I carb loaded for my run as best I could by using sweet potato and whatever other vegetables I could dig up instead of actual grains.  I let my ex-coach be nice to me in front of the boss and ignore me otherwise, and I took my presentations and knocked them out of the park. 

At my niece’s party, I did my best.  I chose the sushi that was there to eat instead of pizza, didn’t even taste the cake, and when the family stuff got uncomfortable, I walked around the party and checked in on my own kids rather than scarfing down the bottomless bowls of chips and M & Ms.

Lastly, there was the run.  This was the stressor I felt the most scared about.  I really didn’t carb load as well as I wanted to (my body just isn’t used to grits, and that was pretty much the only grain carb I could find in North Carolina that wasn’t white bread or those biscuits I mentioned earlier).  I came home from the birthday party so stressed from the family stuff that I didn’t sleep well at all.  But this morning I got up, ate, digested, and set out.

I won’t get into the details, but I did it. It was truly excruciating.  By mile 8, I knew I was going to have a tough time, and by mile 13 I started wishing that I’d brought my cell phone so I could call my husband, Wil, and have him come get me.  At mile 16 I decided I was better off without my cell phone, since that call would have been me sobbing so badly that Wil would have thought it was an obscene phone call of a woman screaming and breathing heavy, and would have hung up on it – or not (and I don’t think I want to know).   My knee hurt, my hip hurt (and that was a new pain and was somewhat alarming), but mostly my head hurt.  What I mean is that everything that had gone on the past few days just started to get to me.  I couldn’t do this run.  I was too stressed, there was too much going on, the planets felt out of alignment.  And then I thought back to my “Fat Girl” days when I could come up with any kind of excuse as long as it sabotaged my visions and goals for myself. Yes, I had all this going on, but I think the technical term for it is “life”.  Life happens, and if we start using our own lives as our excuses, we’re never going to get anywhere.

Once I had that clarity (which at that point in my run amazed me that I was capable of any form of cognition whatsoever), I plugged along.  I knew I was going to finish this run, that I HAD to finish this run.  I stopped sabotaging my own efforts 4 years ago.  I wasn’t going back there today.

Not only did I finish the run, but I actually clocked a pretty respectable time for a 43 year old former Fat Girl with a list of life issues that goes from here to New Bern, NC.  Next week is a “step back” week, so my long run is a mere 14 miles, but the week after that is 20 mile run #2, but that’s OK.  Today I proved to myself that there is plenty of room in my life for 20 mile runs :-).