Yet Another Way the World Doesn't End

Here's something that happened yesterday: I blew off a run. Just totally blew it off. I took a nap instead. I haven't done this in months—so many months I can't figure out when the last time was, but it was probably sometime around Christmas. For the past seven months, I have gone on every single run that was on my training program. Until last night.

Yesterday was also the first day in a long time—weeks, if not months—that I took a day off from working out without substituting something else in. I have recovery days, where I cross-train (that's pretty much every day I don't run), and I've replaced a handful of them over the past few months with another activity—swimming, say, or serious heavy-object-hauling yard work. Generally, though, I've been adding that kind of activity to my day after my workout is complete. Three times in the last ten days or so, I've followed up a workout with an active swim with various nieces and nephews—the kind where I'm swimming short-length laps to help a nephew get comfortable in the deep end, or playing some sort of water volleyball-esque game or whatever, not the kind of swim where I lie on a raft and bribe children to bring me beverages (although that sounds like a fabulous idea…).

But yesterday, I was tired. To be honest, I've been tired for a long time—it's been a couple of weeks since I really felt enthusiastic about a run, or felt especially good during one. It's been a million degrees with approximately one thousand percent humidity, which makes it more difficult to stay comfortable during workouts, and that doesn't help matters. Mostly, I've been forcing myself to complete the mileage, just grinding out one run after another, one cross-training session after another. I've been doing this for a number of reasons, but there are two major ones, I believe, and they're directly related.

First, I'm in the middle of a ridiculously busy month. Jed's sister and her family arrived a little over a week ago from South Korea—they've come a long way, and we don't see them anywhere near enough, and we love them and want to spend time with them. My parents arrive (with their hilarious little dog) today, and they're here, in part, because two of our closest friends are getting married on Saturday. Jed and I are standing up for them, so the next few days will be full of gatherings and dinners and rehearsals and making sure the alterations on Jed's suit look as good as they should (and damn, does that man look good in a suit). Shortly—perhaps even just a day or so—after my parents leave, my good friends Kristin and Paul are coming from Chicago for a week, and their visit is overlapping by a day with a visit from my friend Lawrence, who will ride with me to a week-long poetry conference/retreat in Connecticut, and by the time that ends, it will be August. And that's just the fun stuff—I've got a lot of work that needs to be done in there, and it would be nice if I could, I don't know, maybe actually write a poem or something.

All this to say that I'm worried about time. I'm worried that I will be more interested in hanging out with any of the above-mentioned people than putting in a 2 1/2-hour run. Or a 60-minute run. Or any run at all. This feeds into my second fear, which is this:

If I slow down, I might stop.

That is blatantly insane. My running came to a screeching halt between Christmas and New Year's, and I managed to come back to it feeling renewed from the break—refreshed, focused, ready to set new goals and knock them down. Yet I'm still worried that deviating from the plan will set off a domino effect of missed workouts, food binges, and who knows what else. Ah, the gap between intellectual knowledge and emotional knowledge. Such a wondrous place to live. This worry is directly linked to my need to feel like I'm in control, and since I don't feel in control of much of anything these days, giving up one of the few things that's completely my own, even for one day, was more difficult than I expected. I ended up feeling antsy last night and had a tough time getting to sleep.

I should be clear that I wasn't beating myself up over the missed run. I didn't feel guilty about it or feel like I was being "bad" (whatever the hell that means) or anything like that. I just felt…off. A little displaced, and a little anxious, like I had missed an important meeting or something. You know that feeling you get in that dream where you're supposed to take a final for a class you've been skipping all semester, and you can't even find the classroom, much less figure out how you're supposed to take the exam? Sort of like that.

So today, I run. My parents won't be here until later this afternoon or early this evening, so I've got time to prioritize, and time to layer things into my schedule: get up on time despite the lack of sleep, get my breakfast so it has plenty of time to settle, vacuum while Jed's out with the dogs (when you have 2 giant dogs, it's far easier to vacuum if they're out of the house), get the run in, eat lunch, get cleaned up. I'm also supposed to go help our friends do some last-minute yard preparations for the wedding, so I'll do that after lunch if the weather holds. I'll work in some other stuff while I'm at it—getting some food together for tonight, writing this blog post, taking out the compost—but my to-do list starts with scheduling the run, and everything else has to fit in around that. It's what works best for me, and I know I'll feel a little more like myself again once I make it happen. And that's what it comes down to: this happens because I make it happen. Taking a break—one I clearly needed—doesn't change that at all, and if it happens again over the next several weeks, I'll be better-prepared to deal with it. Onward and upward, friends, one step at a time.