Running Down a Dream

Screw my body; I want to keep my brain forever.

Many irritated apologies for not catching you and me up on all that’s happened. I think I may have to go to the ‘write less, but more often’ model, since I’ve begun, mind-melded and lost at least 4 posts since I wrote last, and that does not count all the writing I lost in the 2 weeks between the last post and the one before that. But enough whining. I’m already hopelessly behind.

So let me hit the highlights and then challenge myself to write an under-500 word post, so everyone can keep current without having to devote an entire morning to reading each of my musings. Here goes.

1. My decision on whether I’m finished losing weight, or just stuck on 153 for the rest of my life, or maybe just eating too much Fat Free Reddi-Whip now that Howard is traveling 100% of the time, continues to be a point of daily debate inside the entropy of my mind.

2. Akin to ‘am I done already?’ I ask myself if I should just pretend that I’m always losing, since on the days (okay, hours) that I’ve decided I’m actually on maintenance vs. stuck at 153 pounds, I wind up eyeballing all form of Bad For Me foods. This week, I actually ate a Pop-Tart. I didn’t even really have those when I was fat! They’re not food, there’s nothing of merit in them, and frankly, since I am no longer 9, they don’t taste all that good. I’m up a pound this week, and I’m pretty sure it was the (stale!) Brown Sugar Cinnamon “pastry” that I ate this week, instead of the frozen grilled shrimp that had been left for me by my caring-yet-absent fiancé.

3. Single parenting SUCKS, and is made double-sucky since Howard is actually a participating partner in our lives. DS and I do all right, but we’re basically dormant while he’s gone, and while I stew in guilt about it during the day, I simply cannot bring myself to do anything fun with DS in the evenings. For DS’s part, he seems content to flop on the couch and let me read to him or watch “West Side Story” for the bazillionth time. Seriously, that has to stop. Good film, and the longer scenes don’t affect him the way current television does, but he’s starting to quote some of the movie now, and there are a few epithets that no one should utter, least of all a 5-year old about to enter kindergarten.

4. DS is going to regular, mainstream kindergarten next year. After a long, funky, oddball negotiation with the IEP team, they agreed, with extreme reluctance and prejudice, that, given the unavailability of our first choice (let him go all day, in the self-contained K half day and the mainstream half day), that he really was better suited for mainstream, especially if he had an aide. So, noting item 3 above, I have a lot of social skills training to do with DS prior to the first bell in August.

5. Now that DS has a diagnosis and a placement for next year, I have finally gotten him into a private speech therapy class. He’ll go twice a week, once for 1:1 therapy and once to a small group that emphasizes speech and social skills, and is designed for children like him, with high intelligence and mind blindness. He’s already come so far, and I think this will really catapult him into Me But Typical for next year. I’m trying really hard not to get overenthusiastic about this, especially since he’s been talking so much more lately, and with greater diction and sentence structure. He’s still far behind in social skills, and that’s key in a mainstream situation, so we’ll see how the summer goes.

6. Since my Awesome Boss has ladeled all kinds of new work on me, including a bunch of finance/accounting things about which I know nothing, I have decided that now, 20 years since I graduated with my B.A., is the perfect time to get that advanced degree. I researched programs for a month and finally settled on a place where I’d done a few grad classes back in the 90s (yeah, I’ve been kicking this around for a LONG time). They’re going to give me credit for the work I’ve done, even though it was 9 years ago, and my advisor has encouraged me to CLEP test out of a few prerequisites, so if I get all that done, I will finish my MBA in 2 years. I do find it funny that I’m on board with the CLEP thing, though I admit that is largely because these tests are administered in test centers and not in freezing college cafeterias, where I’d be a caffeine-deprived middle-aged woman in the midst of hung over teens, taking the same dang tests and wondering what the Hock I was doing there. This way, I can humiliate myself in private, study from the comfort of my “crib”, and nobody has to know that I’m taking a college-entrance exam at 42. Well, nobody but me, Howard, and all of you, but hey, what’s a little teen humor between old fogeys?

That’s the big stuff. Now on to the less newsworthy but more Obsession-minded: my running.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered 2 running junkies at the office. Both are women, both have children, and both have run for years, so they have tons of advice for me. The Director is a hard core runner, who even now, years removed from her regular training still clocks a 6:08 mile when she’s (in her terms) ‘laying up’ in a race. The other is 5 months removed from having her second baby and is training for the Chicago Marathon this October. I managed to snag the Momma for lunch last week, and I dragged a ton of ideas out of her. She rattled off speed workout ideas and shoe shopping suggestions, and diagnosed my “I’m gonna retch” sensation by announcing that I was dehydrated and that I had to over-water myself on the day before I run, as well as the day of my workout.

One thing both women talked about at length was the Runner’s High-that moment when you’ve pushed past The Wall and then feel like you could run forever. Momma said that I wasn’t getting it because I was doing interval training-that builds my fitness faster but it keeps me from the endorphin rush, since I stop when it gets hard. She suggested I run just a little on my days off, just to see if I could run a mile without stopping, or half a mile, if that’s all I could do. Determined to get The Rush, I agreed.

Well, I’m a forty-something newbie runner, so the idea of running when I should be resting my gonna-get-arthritis knees worries me. But I got stuck in the house on Monday, and so DS and I loaded up the treadmill and I ran until I had to stop. I did most of it at 6mph (10-min/mile pace), and while I was tired, it felt pretty good. I made it 2 miles (yay!), but I also thought I could do more. I didn’t look at the monitor until I hit 1.4 miles but then I was constantly looking down at it and I’m pretty sure I sabotaged myself.

Wednesday, I decided to try again. I packed my gear and left work a little early. I went to the Herrick Lake preserve by my office and mapped out a route. The path around the lake is exactly 1 mile. I would run it as long as I could, at least 2 miles though, and just stop when I had to.

I got to 3 miles and was so surprised that I stopped, fearful of hurting myself. I walked for about 30 seconds, but my breathing was back, and so off I went. That last mile hurt, and then I got worried that I’d be late getting home, so I left. Final mileage: 4.0, at 27 minutes, or roughly 6:15/mile. (over 9mph). I have NO idea how I ran that fast-I really felt I was running at a comfortable, easy-to-maintain pace.

I spent Thursday and Friday determined to get back to Herrick and see if I could get that 5^th mile in. In the mean time, Maria the Spectacular invited me to join her and her daughter for a 10k race. Ten kilometers is 6.2 miles. I agreed to sign up. And then my Psycho Competitor Brain jumped in and said ‘hey, if you ran those 4 miles so easily and so fast, I’ll bet you could do a whole 10k without stopping. Just take it easy, and I’ll bet you can do it.’

I decided to take an extra day off, to get my body healed completely, so I had no soreness excuses to keep me from running as far as I could. Howard and I loaded up the van, bolted DS’s new tag-along bike to Howard’s gleaming silver streak (father’s day present), and off we went. I was nervous, but determined to try. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t run the whole thing today. The longest I’d run at all was 5 miles, and that was on intervals, and the longest I’d run without stopping was 4 miles, and that was just 2 days before.

I made it.

Ran the whole thing. Six-point-two miles. 10k. Final time: 44:15, or roughly 7 minutes per mile (just over 8mph). I got REALLY tired on mile 4 and insanely tired on mile 5, but I kept going, knowing the runner’s high would kick in and I could go on forever. Somewhere in the middle, I convinced myself that if the high hit late enough, I might run 7 miles. Or 8. Or 10. The half-marathon couldn’t be far behind.

Well, yeah, actually, it is. I made the whole thing, but I was slower than the 4 miles, and I never got the runner’s high. Or maybe I did, but I missed it because I was dodging toddlers and some clown walking his Great Pyrenees across the span of the trail. I was pretty sure at some point I was running slower than I could have walked, but I kept the spring in my step, I kept my head down on the inclines, and I refused to stop, even when my body hinted that Old Ladies new to running shouldn’t be out dong 10k runs without months and months of training and Hal Higdon (running guru-apparently) whispering in their ear.

My brain, though, refused to quit. That last lap was hard-unbelievably tough and seemed to take forever, but I did it, and it was not The End for me. My calves are sore, but I’m not hurt anywhere, and Howard said I looked tired and worked when I finished, but not spent. It’s true. I was tired but I probably could have done more. But that’s enough for today. I’m happy to leave some on the track for next time. After all, I ran a 10k today. All by myself, having never really run more than an occasional sprint to a departing train before this year.

Yay me. But at the same time, there’s still some work to do….somewhere. I think.

I did what I wanted to do and switched my goals from weight loss to fitness. Somehow, though, I remain frustrated. Does it matter that I’m 153 pounds (154 today, grrrr!), even as I’m comfortably in size 2 everything, when at 157 pounds in March I was a 4 or a 6? I know that size loss is all due to this exercise. I even look different since March, even in my face, and that’s unexpected change for a bunch of running.

Will it eat at me forever that I’ve lost 97 pounds or 98 instead of the 100 or even 106 I’d hoped for? I don’t know. I don’t see any extra baggage on my body, but since I didn’t choose a goal, I didn’t really reach it and so I’m not sure whether I should stop. I always said I wanted to lose until my body found it’s ‘set point’ and then I would rest happily there, knowing I found my true and healthy bottom. But it’s so weird to have backed into a goal. No answers, and that’s very frustrating for the control freak/gotta know it all now woman that I am. That didn’t change when I got skinny. In fact, if anything, that broad has more energy now, since she doesn’t have to cart around an extra 100 (98!) pounds any more.

I’m very happy down here, wearing size 5 juniors and knowing that often, I’m the thinnest person in the room. What a change it’s been from last June, when I tipped the scales at 251 pounds and couldn’t cross my arms over my chest when I sat down, and, when sitting, couldn’t tell where my boobs ended and my stomach began. Now I’m a 34DD, and while my waist won’t ever be the teeny teen wasp-thing it was, I can wear low-rise jeans without too much protest from the octopus, and really, these days I actually prefer to have pants sitting on my hip bones, because they then accent the athletic shape that I’ve recently created.

What’s next? I just don’t know. Maybe I’ll figure it out on the track, when my body is too busy counting laps to realize that my brain has worked it all out.

A the T(en-k)

PS-That 500-word post thing goes into effect next time. Maybe. :)