For the 10th Time, Put on Your Pajamas, Brush Your Teeth, and Go to Bed

When I am running, no one asks me to help with math homework or matching contractions with their meaning. No one needs me to put on their boots or zip their coats. Or find lost mittens or hats or socks or books. There are no buttons to reattach. No hunger overtaking normally sweet children, turning them into demons. Not everyone is talking at the same time. No 18 reminders to brush teeth and pee before heading to the school bus. Zero whining. There is no legal table to create for the still-unfinished confidentiality manual. No meetings to plan. No ever-at-the-ready cell phone alerting me to a new text/call/email/message/like. Hundreds of actionable emails fade, leaving room for the higher level vision of life and work that is too often pushed aside. 

It is nice that running is good for my body. That is not why I run. I don't run away from the daily demands (although I admit to wanting to run while screaming nearly every day). But I run in addition to the daily demands. To give myself the serenity of time without anyone needing anything from me. An hour without a single demand except the ones that I place on my own body and mind. An hour with only my breath and legs and strongly beating heart.

There is Mundane. And There is Running.

I was in California much of last week for work and so I spent this weekend unearthing the house from my absence. Saturday was mostly laundry. Load after load of it. Sunday was a grueling few hours of opening piled up mail, bill paying, health insurance claiming, and various other paper-based forms of torture. All of this was interspersed with feeding, cleaning up the kitchen, and the periodic entertaining of my children. My daughter's pleasure was sewing and needlepoint and I was frequently asked to thread a needle or tie a knot. With my son these days my primary role is making sure he does something other than play Minecraft. 

I always feel better when long-delayed tasks are no longer hanging over me. But in the moment I feel: 1) annoyance that my life is submerged in the mundane; 2) anger at myself for not doing it sooner; and 3) a nagging desire to stop mid-stream and find something fun and/or meaningful to do.

With the cold and the darkening Sunday sky it took a lot of my own willpower and urging from my husband to pull on my running shoes and head out the door. The thought of a run felt simultaneously hugely unpleasant and like a gift that my procrastinating self did not deserve. I had run 7.5 miles on Saturday with an errand to get my daughter's sewing supplies built into the last two miles of it. Sunday's reluctant 2.5 miles was just enough to shake loose my house-tired body and free my spirit.

Heading into Monday lighter.

In Case You Mistook Me for a Barbie

I finished yesterday's post feeling a bit like a sunshiny Pollyanna. A Malibu Barbie with every duck lined up neatly in a row. Today I am writing to set the record straight.

While I know I am very fortunate in many ways and have enough perspective to laugh at myself when I whine, I have plenty of whiny days.

I feel too in demand by my kids most days. And parenting is tough and some of the time I, frankly, don't think I'm very good at it. I am incapable of keeping on top of the clutter and the laundry. I have too much on my plate and that leads to a feeling of disorganization and overwhelm. Some days I can't see the forest for the trees and other days can't see the trees for the forest. I forget to be happy and in the moment far too often. I forget to rely on others. I don't often see my friends and miss them. I haven't seen a movie in the theatre (Disney doesn't count) in more years than I have fingers on one hand. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I still miss my mother, especially when I am sick or sad. I'm my toughest critic. There are not enough hours in my days to be a good partner and good mother and good CEO and good runner, forget reading fiction or swimming or playing or making pottery or drawing or dancing or traveling or happily sleeping late or practicing piano or listening to music or sitting quietly on the beach or or or.

But I run. And running takes me away and grounds me at the same time. It puts me squarely in the moment. Like few other moments in my life, it offers tangible opportunities to view improvement, success, and the results of hard work.

And so I run.

The Ordinariness Of It

I ran every day during the month of December just as I had the previous December. My 2012 streak was full of epiphanies and enormous changes in my strength, endurance, and focus. Although not entirely causal, a year of strong running followed, including two new personal records in half marathon and marathon distances, PRs that I had been chasing down without success for several years.

This December, as I embarked on my daily runs, I searched for the same kind of changes and realizations I had experienced last year. But no epiphany. Instead, it felt oddly ordinary.

I chose December as my month to streak because it is the anniversary of my start at distance running. I live in Brooklyn, New York. And while we have four seasons here, winters are comparatively mild without much snow accumulation and temperatures generally hovering around or just below freezing with some milder and some colder days. All the same, if I was going to generate excuses for not running, December sure could be the month to generate them. First is the weather. I prefer the cold to the heat and do love running in the gentle rain and snow, but it is not hard to tire of the extra discomforts and clothing requirements of winter runs. Combine the cold with my full-time job, special events for my two young children, winter illnesses, holiday preparations, and school vacation at the end of the month, and excuses not to run could take over.

But they didn't. Every day I pulled on running gear and took to the streets. I usually ran in the early morning after dropping kids off at the school bus. But one day the only time I could find to run was nearly midnight after a full day of work travel. To avoid injury, I kept each run relatively short, ranging between two and seven miles. My body was strong. I ran hard and fast. I experienced incredible joy and ease in each run. But that didn't feel like enough and I kept searching for more meaning.

Several people, runners and non-runners, following my streak called it impressive. Mid-month my reply to the impressive label was that I saw it differently:  that it was a self-indulgent gift to myself. Yesterday, a running buddy told me that my streak had inspired him to show up to a race starting line on a rainy January morning.

And it was in that moment that I fully realized that its very ordinariness was what made this past month most extraordinary. I am a 49 year old woman blessed with a strong and healthy body and a mind willing to disregard discomfort in order to live a life that is, to me, full of promise, joy, and ease. Some runs were more challenging than others, but I never regretted a run. Instead, each run delivered a heap of gratitude for being out of my desk chair, away from life's obligations for that moment and, especially, for being alive and moving through this beautiful world.