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Two years

Two years

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How January is already behind us and that fewer than 100 days stand between my first marathon of the year and me is mind-boggling. January brought with it a solid month of training, with a handful of days off (most of them while we were in the Dominican Republic with family at the beginning of the month). Since school and life as usual resumed earlier in the month, everything seems to be rolling along at its usual frenetic pace. 

January: ~209 miles; ~10,200′ vert; lots and lots of smiles (PC: Janet)
gang’s all here four time zones away!

In recent history, the end of January/beginning of February transition always leaves me feeling a bit unsettled — equal parts hyperaware and uneasy, like I’m constantly searching for something.  It was on February 4th, two years ago, that I had a stroke out of seemingly nowhere.

To this day, it’s still such a bizarre thing to talk about when it comes up in conversation because the topic brings with it an onslaught of questions that I don’t necessarily feel like entertaining. 

All I can say — rather unhelpfully — is that weird shit happens every single day of the year, to people all over the world, and sometimes without a lot of reason or explanation. On February 4th, 2018, something weird happened to me. That said, without question, I was one of the extremely lucky ones. 

The fragility, sanctity, and gift of life is something that I think has always been at the forefront of my mind, in some capacity, thanks to the media that I regularly consume. Even still, since having that major health emergency two years ago — as well as the truly life-changing experiences of being pregnant, giving birth and raising children — at the risk of sounding super crunchy, there are so many times now in my day-to-day life where I often wish I could somehow capture a moment or feeling forevermore.

Breathing it in isn’t enough; I want to bottle it.

I feel it when I run, regardless of pace or distance, but especially on those special days that Csikszentmihalyi talks about, when it all just flows, and there’s no stopping or limit imaginable. As a runner in my mid-30s now, who has been doing this long stuff for over a decade, I have more mileage and speed in my legs than I could have ever imagined when I began it all in earnest in 2007. Lindsay Crouse’s recent NYT opinion piece really resonated with me (and with so many others), and like she said, there are runs that happen where I finish and all but let out a HELL YEA! I JUST DID THAT! because I’m in disbelief at what my body just produced. Not knowing the end limit of my potential is really exciting and is enough to get me out the door each day to strive.   

I feel it with my children, even in the most inane circumstances of our day-to-day. The best way I can describe it is that sometimes I watch them talking to me — and I hear them, and I see their mouths moving — but it’s as though I’m watching from above. I am just in utter amazement that we created these two beings and that they are growing every day and figuring out the world in their own way, but they still need us in ways that they can’t always describe or ask. I am immeasurably proud of them for who they are becoming as individuals, and watching it unfold some days all but takes my breath away.

I’ve heard it said before that having children is like having your heart and soul on the outside, or something like that, and man, that’s right. Raising children is truly harder than any job I’ve ever had or degree I’ve ever earned. That said, it’s so deeply gratifying (and frustrating at times, of course) that I swear that I can feel it on a cellular level. 

Wanting to freeze time to capture a moment and feeling isn’t limited just to running or to my kids, of course. There are so many instances with my husband, with my own parents and siblings and in-laws and family members, and with my friends where, when we all part to go our own separate ways, the feeling that I have in my chest is just indescribably satisfying.

The shit-eating grin marks and crow’s feet lines just get deeper; I’m okay with that. 

This is all getting way more crunchy and embarrassing than I was going for — my bad — but I guess given the experience that I had two years ago and what I could have had, it’s damn near impossible to not be a little (a lot) reflective at this time of year.

Waking up each day grateful to have woken up at all and to be given another day of life is enough. 

I am one of the supremely lucky ones.

Blips in time

Blips in time

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As much as I love marathon training and racing this distance, I’ll be the first to admit that much of the time, it’s a lot of minutiae. Yes, it’s one sport — running — but I’ll concede that you can cut it a thousand different ways; I’m talking long runs, speed workouts, tempo runs, fartleks, LSD runs, trails, hill repeats, you get the idea. 

It’s the same activity, just done … differently, kinda.  

Even though we have such a huge variety of “types” of running at our fingertips when we’re in the thick of training, it’s easy to get bogged down in it, in the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, hundreds of thousands of times, while we propel ourselves in a generally-speaking forward direction. 

in the thick of it with J at my side (praise be) (PC: J)

That said, even when the tedium of training can be mind-numbing, I’m a firm believer that it confers so many other beneficial, transferable skills that the good stuff far outweighs the bad. Of course, I’m talking about the immeasurable value of consistency, showing up, learning how to listen to our bodies (which sometimes is on its own separate page from our minds), gritting our teeth and grinding when the time is right, and rinsing and repeating day after day, week after week. 

When I’m in the thick of it, I find it immensely helpful to remember that the process is the beauty and the beauty is the process. 

Keep the thing The Thing. 

Even when the minutiae swells deep, remembering to zoom out and acknowledge that this training cycle — this training run — is part of the larger narrative unwinding as I’m living it. 

keeping the thing The Thing (PC: J)

It’s nothing but a blip of time in the long haul, and learning this — and accepting this — has been remarkably freeing. No longer do all my eggs go in one basket each week or in each training cycle. 

It’s all part of the longer trajectory. 

Marathon training also confers to me the rather convenient side benefit of quantifying (or qualifying) my life in several weeks- or months-long cycles, the end of which is marked by the final, culminating race (or races, plural, as it sometimes is). When a particular cycle concludes, once I complete the race — regardless of how my performance fared on the day — I have a better barometer by which I can measure whatever it is what I want to measure. 

What does this mean? Surely the obvious stuff — how many miles I ran in that cycle, my total elevation gain over the last couple months, how fast I ran on The Big Day — but also the less-obvious stuff, too — how much over the past X number of weeks or months did I show up when it all kinda sucked? How often did I give up when training got hard? How successful was I at controlling my attitude and my effort? When I was positive that it couldn’t be done, did I actually go and do it? I find all of this tremendously valuable and again, so deeply transferable to other aspects of my life. 

I purposely don’t talk much in this space about my non-running life, but the transferability of lessons learned while training to parenting, especially, roll deep. Ask any parent, whose child is any age under the sun, and they’ll all tell you how fast time seems to go, how frenetic the pace is once children reach a certain age (and certainly once they begin attending school). 

so big

Like training, in parenting, it’s so, so easy to get bogged down (and some days, to feel altogether trapped) by the minutiae and the tedium, and here again, I have found that remembering that right now — regardless of the severity (and impressive scale!) of tantrum your child just threw, the untold number of diapers or spit-up-upon shirts or shorts you’ve changed, whatever the case may be — it’s all fleeting. 

It’s all blips in time. 

first time for everything

In parenting as in with training, taken together, all those little blips in totality can create something more profound and deeply awe-inspiring than we could have ever imagined. 

Being there for it — witnessing it, helping it along day after day, nurturing it to come into its own — is such an incredible gift and a privilege for which I am so deeply and humbly grateful. 

xo

The process is the beauty. 

The beauty is the process.