Sicker Than Others

I did everything wrong leading up to my first race. I might have been a girl going to junior prom who bought her dress at Goodwill and had her blind grandmother do her hair with foam rollers.  Do you want to know how many training miles I logged this week? One. How many miles I logged last week? Three. I didn’t even deserve to BE in this race. Whatever. I read these posts about being an expert and how it takes dediction and daily work and I almost didn’t do this race because of my clear and obvious non-dedication to my training this last week. Or last month. (I’ll give myself a pass on the entire fall because I was ill.) Plus I have a character flaw, maybe you’ve noticed it: if I’m not an instant expert at something, I like to abandon it.

I decided that’s stupid, because it’s a 30 minute run and how will I ever be dedicated if every time I derail for a few days I just start flogging myself and decide I don’t fit in with the elites and quit? The girl with the blind grandma and the goodwill dress can go to prom too, you know. If she bought her ticket she can fucking go. So I went, and I beat my best 5K time, which considering I think can count on my hands the number of runs I’ve completed since September, is OK with me.

I get to call myself a runner now and you can take that away from me when you pry my “first 5K medal” from my cold, dead fingers. Hell yes I took the medal, I’m not proud. But I didn’t wear my race shirt to the race, my friend Christian warned me not to do that because nothing screams “I’m a race n00b” like wearing your race shirt in the race he says.

So I left my shirt at home along with my family (vomiting children had us up until 2 a.m.) and I set out this morning when it was still dark and hit up the indie do rag coffee pusher before they opened (because that’s how a pusher treats his best customer) and they hooked me up with some pre-race Rocket Fuel. This exquisite nectar from the Gods consists of several shots of espresso, simple syrup & a tiny bit of steamed milk  served in a shot glass. Since I don’t drink alcohol shots anymore this is a close as I get to debauchery.

I know. I’m a champion at Race Prep. Well, I did enter this 5K several ounces lighter then when I awoke this morning. And that’s all I’ll say about that. This may become my personal streamlining tool.

I drank a Green Machine and scarfed a banana in the car, arrived an hour early, chattered nervously to the guys that helped me park and got some important training advice from one of them about my shoes:

Well, you only run 4 miles right now but if you were doing any sort of serious training or running for speed, trying to win races at all, you wouldn’t be wearing those.

I’ll be extremely pleased to see this guy next year (OK, maybe the year after) when I win a race in my Vibram FiveFingers- or better yet, with no shoes at all.

For Future Reference: Next year I’ll sleep in. There’s no reason to show up 90 minutes before the race begins. Bo-RING. Lots of time to stand around and take self portraits.

33:15

The Race:

I took other advice I was given and stuck to the side and to the back of the pack. I let the adrenaline junkies haul ass. Then I passed some of them. Then some of them passed me back. Then a whole lot of people passed me on their way back while I was still headed toward the turnaround. Man, that’s demoralizing., but whatever. Most of those people were 12. Or 22. Same diff.

At mile 1, when I saw the 10:30 on the clock I thought, “well OK, I’m all right. I can pick it up and get in under 30. Or I can stay at this pace and kick it in at 33 ish” I don’t know what happened, man. I just- didn’t pick it up. I did a little, just not enough and then when the logjam happened on the bridge, and when I stopped to get that little cup of water, and put my hat on the table, and got stuck behind that walker on the trail.. Then I decided not to attempt the sprint to the finish. Some 8 year olds were sprinting and I um….yeah. I just decided not to. I don’t know, if my family had been there I’d have done it, you know? If if if.

Does everyone do that after their first race? After every race? I guess I’ll find out, because I’ve decided my resale business needs to ramp up so I can fund my race schedule.

My results: 33.15, after futzing around realizing my chip was gone, looking up at the clock when I saw I didn’t have a chip-I’ll take it. 12th out of 28 in my age group.

I didn’t have to talk too much about my shoes. One guy asked me if I ran the whole race in them- as if I stopped in the middle of the three miles and switched shoes? I said “I run every race in them!” and then he asked me if I was in Avatar. Um, WTF.

/race report

• couch to 5K progress and a rave this time
• instead of weeding the garden beds
• Viva La Vibram
• it wasn’t so much fireworks as a burning hole of humilation in the pit of my stomach
• posts from the road, in installments

I fall into bed at night somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 a.m. and by fall I mean close the book I’m stubbornly reading by flashlight for hours after I climb into the bed beside Jack. I could have been in here hours ago but I was really busy not working but thinking about work doesn’t that count?

I don’t know where the time goes, I really don’t. I just know what happens when they go to bed at night is that the clock goes on fast forward and the work that I thought I’d get done when they went to bed suddenly gets pushed behind just a few minutes checking a few things and then maybe it’s done or maybe it isn’t. And when finally it’s bedtime, I just want to read a motherfuckin few pages of a book or texts from last night for a minute! God!

That’s how the day is too, but less because he’s awake.  You have to go straight from the bedroom right into the bathroom first thing. That’s my number one tip.

1) Bed. Bathroom. Brush teeth and wash face and if you’re doing makeup do it now because you will not have time later, I promise. You think you don’t have anything to do today? Think again. Put some mascara and lipstick on. Now. Then pee. And pick up the laundry on your way out. My kid is the biggest time suck, the most demanding high stress job I have ever had. And he’s just being a kid! It’s unbelievable how utterly and completely spent I am after just a regular day of simply meeting his needs. Do not discount how fucking hard this marathon of a job is. Prepare.

I don’t bother making beds, I just shut the door. We’re not going back there until 12 hours from now anyway. Here’s a really important thing I do on days when I don’t lose the entire day to the internet:  Blinders when I pass the office. Walk straight to the kitchen/laundry. Which leads me to :

2) Screw laundry day. I’m a one loader. Laundry, then coffee, then feed children. In that order. He’ll be whining by now, and  it’ll get ugly. I might have yelled a couple times between the bathroom and the kitchen depending on how late I slept. If it’s 8, maybe not. If it’s 10, and he’s really hungry, there will be yelling proportionate to his whining. He doesn’t think breakfast means food, so he’s screaming about snack and I’m saying “I’m making breakfast soon” and he’s screaming “I DON’T WANT BREAKFAST” and it goes downhill fast.

Now it’s playtime. There’s no such thing as time management here because why the hell would you need to manage this time. This post is about time management for not-busy people.  We either play, or we don’t play. There are play days, and then there are TV and zombie facebook time suck crying jag days. Today was one of those and I’m sad to admit that my son has seen and will see lots of them. You get the parents you get. I’m working on it.

Somehow 3:00 comes around and what do you know, nothing has been cleaned or cooked and that laundry? Is still in the washer. I know, you were waiting for the rest of my tips, where I tell you when I put the laundry in the dryer while taking out the dinner stuff, yeah? I don’t do that stuff unless I remember to. But usually I’m either playing in the bean town or I’m on facebook or the treadmill, and managing the rest of the day is incredibly hard because it’s not scheduled. And when it is scheduled that’s incredibly hard because scheduling your day when there’s nothing you really have to do is stupid. Which leads me to

3) Don’t schedule every minute of the day just so you can make sure your oven gets cleaned regularly. That’s stupid. (or what I mean is, that doesn’t work for me…) My son is not yet 3. I am living the charmed life of a mother who plays with her son all day. There’s no place we have to be. Why is god’s name would we schedule our day? Especially around housework.  Beyond we get up, we pee, we brush our teeth, we put in the laundry…we play it by ear. Some days the house gets cleaned. Some days it doesn’t. I used to be really, really freaky about this and there are times that I am really freaky about it still. I’m in a non freaky time and my husband can attest that he likes me better this way I think.  God. It’s just housework, we’re not ending the cold war. I wrote a post about this a long time ago and I love to go back and read it. You should too.

I’m not a career housewife and I don’t want flylady telling me how to schedule every second of my day. You know what I do? Prioritize.  Sometimes that works, and sometimes my house looks like shit and I’m embarrassed when people come around.  So I don’t invite them.

Some days I lose a whole day to the internet, like today. Sometimes it’s worth it, like yesterday, and other days it’s necessary, like today which was a really horrible awful day and the only way through it was to sit here and stare at the computer and the TV and watch Real Housewives of Orange County and cry. But what the hell, of course I did- when things are bad, I turn to the internet like we all do: it’s well documented that we’re getting lonelier and more isolated and I think stay at home mothers get the worst of it because we don’t even have jobs to go to- we have no one to interact with except children, all day long. In fact if you want to lose even more days on the internet you can use some of your free time to read Six tips on how to fight isolation as a stay at home mom but then you wouldn’t need my post because you’d be scheduled out the ass. Pass for me since I don’t leave the house.  Here’s a good one pager on how to stop being depressed about being a stay at home mom. I wish I’d read that one six years ago! My work here is done!

Anyway. Since none of those links solved my time management problem or my isolation problems, I’ll move along.

A few more things that make a difference during my completely unscheduled days (which are all of them):

During the day I only answer calls if I can keep them short. I can’t have a meaningful conversation with someone when it’s peppered with “no! Jack get down. Jack! The cat is not for lick-JACK! .do not put the cat in the dryer. Sorry, what were you saying about Sarah Palin?”

Bills, banking  and paying clients are for after kids go to bed, no matter how tempted. I’m already on the computer, why? Because all of those things are depressing and make me yell at Jack, and he hears “IN A MINUTE!” a lot already.

COFFEE FIRST. Then breakfast. Oxygen mask goes on the grownup FIRST. THEN the child. I cannot stress this enough.  If the morning starts out right, you’ve got a fighting chance.

I’ve been working hard lately to figure out where I fit into Jack’s new life. He’s a a little more independent but he still needs me so much that I can’t start a project of my own, or sit down to do any actual work. I can be in the room, and half present, but I still have to BE there.  It’s that In Between thing again, which I’ll write about tomorrow. I hate being in between.

• after the bomb went off
• Updates
• motherhood has a shitty benefits package
• verbose today
• real-time barney blogging

Speaking of running: Yeah, that. I wish I could say that I’ve been running SO MUCH that I haven’t had a chance to be here, but you’d know I’m lying because I just told you why I haven’t been here. However: running. LOVE IT. Barefoot running. SO AWESOME. If you’re running in shoes and it hurts: UR doin it wrong. Take them off.

No seriously. I’m running a 5K this weekend. I might come in under 34 minutes, maybe. I’ve been training in VFF’s when outside both due to cold and chickenshittedness. I scraped up the side of one of my feet one night, and since I have the run this weekend I decided to train in the VFFs. With the VFFs my knees are sore, so obviously my form is not awesome when not barefoot, but my pace is better in the Vibrams. Ah, the dilemma of speed (& knee pain/injury) vs. loyalty to the cause (&pain-free running).

There’s something else, and I freely admit this would be different if I hadn’t lost all the weight due to side effects; but I have absolutely zero concern with the calories burned or the health effects of the running. I just want to. I truly just want to be out there. But not just out there; out there getting faster and running longer.

Ever since I joined dailymile.com I’ve been plagued by that damned feed filled with my “friends” workouts. “It’s like facebook, but for runners!” is what my friend Lance told me when he invited me. Awesome! Yeah and it was for a week or two, until GoPreGo started posting like every single day his 10 mile runs at 7 minutes a mile and that tri mom with the 8 min mile marathons and the swimming and the 100 mile bike rides I mean what the hell?

All I want to do now is be out there, running. Faster and for longer every day. No, not to BEAT anybody. Yet. But just…because if they can do it, then I can too. There’s just no physical reason why not. So I’m going to. I freakin love to run. Today was cold, but worth it. When I got home I found I’d shaved a minute off my average pace and that was even slowing to walk some. That’s huge. I didn’t know I had it in me. Now my question is, how fast CAN I go? How far CAN I go? What do the ultra runners mean when they say they embrace fatigue?  Penelope Trunk’s latest post about being an expert was actually incredibly helpful to remind me that I’m not gonna jump onto dailymile.com and then run out the door four times a week across the street in the 3 mile loop and become an ultra runner or 7 minute miler. Being an expert takes “dedicated, daily practice” and there isn’t a shortcut to being a good runner. I love daily mile because it uses another tactic she talks about in that post, which is crowdsourcing your coaching. Since I don’t have a running coach, I’m crowdsourcing mine. I think its working. For a while I was so dejected about how my confidence suffered reading that feed every day that I almost quit the website, but I’m over it. Check out dailymile.com if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m SummerP over there.

• thank you
• well, shit
• My Negative to Positive Switch is Broken
• free ass
• couch to 5K progress, and a rant

Two things happened in my life recently that took me off the blogging wagon in a huge way:

1)      Running, mostly barefoot. Love it, love it, love it. I’ll explain more later.

2)      Penelope Trunk. I love/hate her. Every time I read one of her posts I learn something, which is the point of her blog. She even advises us that if we’re not learning something when we blog, wtf are we doing blogging anyway, and if we’re blogging without teaching people anything useful we’re just writing in our diaries and who wants to read that boring drivel? I paraphrase, but I think I’m close.

Man, she’s a great blogger, and a fantastically interesting person, too.  She’s done all this really public high profile stuff and she’s done all of it while being fairly quirky and hard to get along with, which is where I get stuck, and sort of why I live my life behind a computer screen. So she’s fascinating to me, and when she rebuked people for writing about nothing, for diary blogs, for writing posts that give nothing useful to the reader I sort of lost my mojo, what little I had left after reading the one about how you should learn something every time you write a post.

She didn’t mean that in the existential, learning something deep about my inner self something way. So I spent 4 days recently trying to write a post because I was researching studies and research papers and all kinds of things and I forgot what I was fucking doing and why I write this blog and that post was shit.

Probably if I asked Penelope Trunk about these posts I’ve read and told her what I took away from them I’d find that I’ve been having a one-way conversation with her and her blog that is very different from the conversation that she would have with me if we were talking. But we’re not, and I live here behind the computer screen.

This is probably a good time to say that I like Penelope Trunk a whole lot, or at least what I know of her online.  I read her blog constantly, have learned a shitload from it and I’m challenged by her advice. I even emailed her once and she emailed me right back. I’m saying all this because I’m going to rip on her in a minute.

The thing is no one can decide from their side of the computer screen what is useful to someone on the other side of the computer screen. Maybe Penelope’s satirical experimental post about nothing did prove that for the Brazen Careerist website, her links were less than exciting for her target audience.

While I was writing this post and doing my due diligence to provide links to the posts I mention in this one, I came across another slap on the wrist from Penelope who tells me that I’m not writing this blog for just me and if I wanted just to keep a diary I would keep one on paper and that “blogs without topics are a waste of time”. To Ms Trunk I would say her Gen-X is showing. I haven’t written more than three paragraphs on paper in years.

“Dear Diary: For a few weeks, I lost my blog erection because of  some self appointed blog expert who told me I wasn’t a credible internet writer unless I adhered to a strict set of rules invented by statistics and comment counts but really that doesn’t matter. Someday this giant pile of raw pieces might net a few essays that could turn into something interesting or submittable, and then they’ll all be SORRY! And even if that never happens my kids and family will always have this to remember me by. (like a scrapbook for young people)  I’m so glad I have you to talk to, Diary. No one else understands!”

I won’t argue with Ms Trunk here and call this a diary and profess that I don’t care who reads it and whether they think it’s good; obviously that would be a lie. I do care and I do spend quite a while on some posts.  I will say though that I don’t think it’s all that necessary right at this moment to pick something and stick with it in order to crank out a quality post. Maybe we, us countless half -in-half out toes in the water writers out there that are just banking up word counts on the internet are just doing that: banking up some word counts for a while, seeing what shakes out.

I don’t see that as a waste or time or a self delusion at all.

• PSA
• no such thing as nipple confusion
• well why didn’t I think of that?
• and the sky opened, and light shone down upon our house

Oh Yeah? Well you can take your runner’s high and shove it up your ass. Because I haven’t yet experienced that sweet sweet love, and I’m sick of fucking hearing about it. Yeah I love running as much as the next guy when I’m not worried about being on my toes too much or whether I’m stepping in stickers because the St Augustine grass is so goddamn long down here.

News Flash: 3.11 miles is not the magic number of miles to run that will put me into the zone that Danielle Seiss talks about in her article Running For My Life (Washington Post, September 15, 2009):” I can actually feel my thinking beginning to change, from negative to positive, as if four miles, or about 30 minutes, is some kind of threshold.”

And believe me, I REALLY want to get there. I ache to get there. I spend about 75% of my mental and physical energy fighting to keep it together and I finally found something that’s 1) free 2) fun 3) legal 4) healthy. Now for the love of god could it please just WORK?

I’m sick of trying to write this stupid post about how running doesn’t do shit for my depression. I wanted to find a study, just one stupid study (and so help me if one of you  leaves a link in the comments to a study I will come through a tube and kill you) about runners (not exercise, OMFG RUNNING) and mental health. Runners specifically, because a large part of how running works for me has to do with the psyching out that I get to participate in when I run out the door. Sometimes I even consider putting a credit card and my driver’s license in my pocket when I leave. I’m not kidding. Anyway, I wasn’t looking for whether exercise helps depressed people-the statistics show that it does, even though we all know that a lot of factors go into whether healthy people are happy people (uh, yeah) and so those numbers would um, be higher. But what I was wondering is whether anything had been done where runners who were depressed kept running and if there was any research done on runners with other mental illnesses. I can’t find any. IF commenters come across any research like that, please feel free to email me.

Here’s something else I love about running and why I’m sad there weren’t studies specific to it when I searched: NO GEAR. No excuses. No schedules. It’s a depressed person’s WET DREAM exercise. Just walk out the door, especially if you’re a barefooter. Just. Go. I can still do it with minimal effort and (this is the really important thing for a misanthropic introvert like myself) zero human interaction.

Then there was this other piece that I read that cited this study from 2000:

Researchers at Nottingham Trent University (UK) claim the chemical phenylethylamine (PEA) to be a byproduct of exercise and the cause of the euphoric mood called “runner’s high.” The researchers measured PEA levels in 20 men before and after exercise and discovered all but two had increased levels 24 hours later. The study’s author, Ellen Billett DPhil says that endorphins, previously thought to cause runner’s high, don’t penetrate the brain as easily as PEA does, though endorphins may still play a role. According to Hector Sabelli, MD, PhD of Rush University in an article in WebMD: “What we have seen is that PEA metabolism is reduced in people who are depressed. If you give PEA to people with depression, about 60 percent show an immediate recovery – very fast, a matter of half an hour.”

(But they are also careful to mention that chocolate has PEA in it too, if you don’t have time that day to get a run in. So I stocked up on dark chocolate for the freezer.)

There they go about the runner’s high again. My question is how long does it last for real? These guys say as much 24 hours. Really. OK. So again I say take your runner’s high talk and shove it up your ass. It’s not that I resent the running; it’s that I resent that I don’t feel awesome.

I’m not stopping. Fuck, I take Krill Oil and a muti-vitamin every damn day and I’m convinced they don’t do shit for me. At least running is free and it sometimes gets me out of changing a shitty diaper. At the least, out of this I get the peace of mind that comes with knowing that out of everyone in my family I’d be the one who could survive a zombie invasion. I’ve already got the #1 rule down: Cardio. They’re screwed

• couch to 5K progress, and a rant
• couch to 5K, or how to torture yourself in the Florida summer
• I have a new barefoot running coach and it’s all of you
• The Next Big Thing
• 32 week medical monitor train

I’m a shitty liberal. So to speak.

I started this post about seven times. I was planning to write eloquently a post about shit, about how today I stood ankle deep in it while my dad took the lion share of a wave while I got merely splashed with it- someone else’s shit, mind you and not the shit of my flesh and blood. I’m no stranger to being touched by feces that didn’t come from my own body I mean I’m a mother after all and I pushed three children from my body from one hole or another both man made and not.

Eloquent may not be on the menu for today, because what I find as I sit down to write is that what I feel like is a conservative. A big, fat, stay off my lawn and out of my stuff conservative and I’m unnerved by that sensation.

I say this for two reasons:

1) Homeless teenagers broke into an RV that we don’t even really own but that is in our care, so to speak, and lived in it during the coldest part of the season. And shit in it.  My liberal brain says “oh, come on! They were cold! You would deny them a place to sleep?” and my conservative brain that spent my whole fucking day cleaning up their shit says “yep. The risk of offering them a place to stay is too great. They are homeless for a reason, and in this case that reason is clear” My liberal brain argues back “well I would not stop doing nice things because of one bad event” as my conservative brain chambers a round.

shitapalooza

2) The reason we were cleaning out the RV at all today (even though we would have had to do this project anyway, justifies my dad after he missed a day of work) was that we offered it to a homeless family. So he came over this morning, towed it to the power pole, wired it to power and hooked it to water, which is when we found out about shitapaloza.

And now they aren’t planning to say here this weekend or possibly at all, and it is 3 p.m. and they just called to let me know. Except the dog is still here in the dogloo we set up for him and I’ve been feeding and playing with him and I don’t want a dog and I also don’t want an RV in my yard and I didn’t want to spend my day setting it up for guests, either. Yesterday my dad was on his way here at 6 p.m. to get the RV set up for them when I called THEM to find out if they were coming back here (after they did their laundry and dropped of their dog) and found out they were staying at the shelter.

And I just want to say “Are you serious? After I did ALL THIS WORK? DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT I GAVE UP FOR YOU? DON’T YOU VALUE MY TIME?”

Except the answer of course, is no. And that’s not the point, as my dad will remind me.

Here’s what my conservative self did right today though: While my dad was running an errand (getting the wire to hook the trailer up for the people who WON’T BE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF OUR GENEROSITY THIS WEEKEND (but I am not bitter about my dad missing work and us standing ankle deep in a pond of shit today.) I ran over three miles barefoot on my treadmill while listening to the Classic Hip Hop channel on Pandora. I squeezed in a few minutes. Baby steps, I guess.

• this is where you’d tell me to stop looking a gift horse in the mouth
• this is the sound of the bottom dropping out
• restricted
• Magazines that make you smart
• holy hell my house is clean