T minus 197 Days 19 Hours 50 Minutes
Maybe it gets easier. I keep thinking. Maybe this shuffle and shimmy of minutes and details and priorities smooths itself out. I keep thinking. Maybe. Maybe the bacon will cook itself. Maybe I won't lose focus the first time I get sleepy, or hungry or ... wait was that a panda?
These are lies of course. I've run 'long' enough times to know - it doesn't get easier; it gets done.
Still the lies comfort me in the wee hours of morning when I could be sleeping. I could be snuggled right there, warm beside my BBF dreaming of the sunrise and all things coffee infused. I dare not however, I know Catherine is on route to run with me. And lets face it.... I'm more than slightly afraid of her.
Still my typical Wednesday hill running guide had the nerve recently to go climb mountains in Colorado, giving her an out for two weeks of of my company. They were interesting weeks. Getting up stupid early on a Wednesday and running, then going to work and trying to motivate myself to get in the pool for an hour or more at 8 or 9pm. Can you say yawn? Who stole my nap? Seriously?
It's then that the painful truth of this Anvil truth seeps in. 36 hours of race time available. How will you use it Batgirl?
Sadly I'll likely be using every second actually racing. Hello, slow moving bus over here.
The first 6 weeks of this plan now feel like a warm up. Like the teaser days of those month long fitness challenges I always get roped into. Ohhh a 15 sec plank! Easy!! yeah wait for the end of the month when it's freaking 9 minutes long batman. And I'm all shaking and hovering there on my forearms cursing the ones who threw my name into the challenge to begin with. Speaking of which I have burpees to do today...
So the first six weeks I bitched and moaned and tossed and turned about details and frantic minutes here or there. And now? Now I'm having nightmares about getting out of the pool and finding the door to the ladies locker room to use the loo, then finding my spot in the pool again to swim the second half of my 3hour laps. As if seeing it once wasn't hard enough.
I'm lucky to know enough long distance runners that there always seems to be a guide somewhere willing to travel a distance or two. Training is supposed to be fun right? It occurred to me last week I've done everything in my power to avoid running alone, even in the dark, since they took down my tree out front of the house. I'm so concerned I'd not be able to make my way back home that I keep chickening out of the solo run. It's a dangerous, dependent ground to stand on. Sometimes you need to know you can alone. In the shuffle of all the details, I've been allowing this to slip. Could it be my own delicate fear of "dis"ability?
But then fear drives us right? Pushes us, just past the place we used to sit comfortably? It wakes us up with brilliantly insane ideas.
Possibility
Hope
Dreams
I've survived 8 weeks of the 'Anvil Plan'. 11 weeks total of this routine. I'm certain it gets trickier. Especially now that my Vermont 100 plan is overlapping the Anvil plan. My alarm clock wakes me at times matching my step sons bedtime. I nap before dinner when no one notices my absence. I still fold laundry between sets of squats. I do dishes between planks and packing lunch. I eat lunch in bites between quad stretches held ever so carefully in the hallway just before my client comes out of the treatment room. And blogging? While my head and heart spin out of control with thoughts of self doubt, progress graphs and omg did I turn the dryer off before leaving the house; the actual act of calming down the world long enough to write the words?
Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade it. To chase your passion? To breath in wisps of intangible dream? It helps when my BBF whispers this is who we are baby, it's what we do. Plus, there's always a faint smell of trail bacon, bone broth, and tada muffins lingering around here, around home.
I got to see it again last Sunday. I got to feel it. We were climbing a hill on the far side of the tenth farmers field we'd crossed. A group of six of us, all sharing space on the northern end of the Grand Valley Trail. Clambering up, sun just poking out. Chill fading, frost melting, mud forming. Wait, pause there just long enough. Turn around among the snagging raspberry bushes, the baby would be briars. Turn around and catch it before it fleets away again. Sunrise cresting the opposite hill. Rows of snowy sleeping corn and bean stalks. The blazes we'd followed poking out along the edges.
Breathe in.
This is why.
Move me as slow as you wish good karma. But this is why I'm here. This is me, being a part of being here. To see where I've come. To see where I'm going. To feel, where exactly, I am.
