Five Things that Don't Suck, Back at It Edition

1. getting back to making clear decisions
2. remembering that sometimes the best cure for tiredness is getting some exercise
3. sweat
4. the shower after a workout
5. not being as far behind as I was afraid I was

On Taking the Compliment

I know I've been relatively quiet, friends, for months even. I realized, while out on my run this morning, that I passed the second anniversary of the FTTDS lists on June 1 and didn't even notice. I just made my list and moved on with the day, which I suppose was part of the point to begin with.

Running has not been easy for me, either, in recent months. I had a series of minor-but-annoying injuries. When I felt better, I hit the treadmill and found just how much fitness I'd lost. When May brought the end of my early mornings on campus and the return of my outdoor (and morning!) running season, I realized just how bad it had become. I couldn't find a pace. Far from being able to run ten or twelve miles, I had to take a walk break on a two miler. It might have been related to my inability to find a pace, it could have been that I'd slipped that far behind—it's likely a combination of the two. But I've been running steadily again since mid-April, and I'm starting to find myself again, and it feels fantastic.

Which is one of the reasons I had such a hard time last week when a missed step on an otherwise strong four miler resulted in me hitting the pavement on my hands and knees, then my right shoulder, then my right cheek. Luckily, I was only about a quarter of a mile from home when it happened, so I cut the last mile from my loop and took the shortest route I could. My face was bleeding as were the heels of my hands, and one knuckle, which had scraped against the ground when my water bottle rolled out from under my hand. It was so bad that I didn't even notice that my knee was scraped and bloody until about five minutes after I got home. I didn't notice my shoulder until I tried to take off my shirt so I could get into the shower.

Anyway, apart from spending a day or two making friends with a bottle of Advil PM so I could get some sleep, I was fine. I'm a quick healer for one thing, and I was lucky for another. I didn't fall into traffic. I didn't break my ankle. I didn't land on my teeth or my nose or my chin. I was a little banged up, but just hours after my fall I was on campus, helping out with new student orientation, and I was back on campus for the five days of orientation that followed that. I spent my first post-tumble evening at our nephew's lacrosse state championship game (they won!), and then at dinner with the Foley clan. I posted pictures to Facebook, talking about what a badass I am.

And I am.

But I also spent a week not running, again. Yes, I was in the middle of a six-day stretch on campus. Yes, my body needed the rest so that it could heal properly. Yes, for several days I could feel every step I took reverberate in my cheekbone (that's weird, for the record. We're not really supposed to be aware of our own cheekbones that way). And I spent some time paying attention to how other runners were talking about their running.

Runners risk being a little obsessive. Running is one of those things that people tend to hate until they love it. We want what's next. We see lots of improvement in the early days and want the next step to come NOW. It's one of the joys of beginning to run—watching your endurance rise from a minute to 90 seconds to two minutes, building and building each week until all of a sudden you can run a mile for the first time maybe ever, then two miles, then three. I built on that joy until I was completing a 10 – 12 mile "long run" every weekend. There's something about running, about knowing that no one, including possibly yourself, is completely convinced you can do this, that is incredibly empowering. I hear versions of my own story a lot. I hear variations on that story, where people tell me that they decided that if I could run, they could run. That's always cool. Those people have been, up to now, exclusively women, and I think it's cool not just that they've decided to try to take care of themselves a bit better, but that they also thought to tell me about my part in that decision. The world could use more of us telling each other we think we're awesome. Or inspiring. Or badass. Choose your term.

The dark side of that story, though, is something that's begun to trouble me more and more. Let me preface this by saying that I'm only interpreting the meaning behind the actions I'm going to describe here: I could be wrong, because I'm not in these women's heads. But I don't think so.

Women punish themselves with exercise. And with food. Or with food deprivation. Or any number of other things. But having more couch time than usual has given me more time than usual to hang out on Pinterest and Facebook, looking in horror at the pictures women share, pictures using words like "skinny" (a word I personally despise) or, worse, "fit." Because often those pictures are of women who look incredibly unhealthy to me. Post after post of "skinny" versions of real food—often using ingredients created in a lab somewhere. Post after post of 1,200- or 1,000-calorie eating plans. Post after post of "everyday" exercise plans and meal-replacement shakes and women hating themselves for what they are.

I also see posts from runners (or people with other exercise plans, but most often runners) that make it clear that exercise isn't a part of health for these women. Women who run every day, giving their bodies no time to recover from the damage they're doing (because when anyone talks about "building muscle" or "strengthening" or "improving," what they're really saying is "doing minor damage so that the muscles/tendons/bones heal stronger"). Women who run every run—every run—with their heart rate monitors in order to ensure every single workout is as hard as it can be (I'm not a health expert, but I have yet to read anything by any expert saying, "Do all of your workouts at maximum effort"). Women who claim to hate all other forms of exercise (running burns a ridiculous amount of calories) and who don't warm up or cool down because it isn't "work." Women posting pictures of themselves from angles designed to minimize the size of their hips or maximize the difference between waist and hip measurements, or pictures of themselves half-hidden behind a running partner, or pictures that leave part of their bodies out of frame.

What disturbs me most about these particular pictures, though, is the expression on these women's faces. I know this is subjective—I know it is—but when I look at these women, it feels like they are desperate for acceptance. I see plenty of pictures of joyous women—finishing a run, getting ready to start a race, otherwise taking pleasure in their accomplishments—but the pictures I'm talking about are different. The women don't look comfortable in their own skins. Their smiles do not contain joy or triumph. They break my heart. Nothing they do is ever good enough for themselves. Running the way they do isn't going to change that and in all honesty, I've stopped thinking that even they believe it will.

Someone—I have no idea who—said it's impossible to hate yourself into becoming a better person. It's true. Also, I know healthy, well-adjusted women who exhibit one or more of the behaviors I've listed above. I understand a lot of the motivations: warming up and cooling down can feel inefficient, so I have to treat it as a non-negotiable part of the workout, which means if I'm pressed for time, I shorten the run, not the walk. I force myself to, because once I let the you're-not-good-enough part of my brain gain traction, it's very, very difficult to dislodge. I worry about how lumpy I will look in a picture. I calculate whether I'm the largest person in the room despite the fact that since I started running, that answer is almost always "no." I feel for these women, I do. I understand the thought patterns. I also understand that sabotage can often disguise itself as a plea for moderation—I have been told I was "getting too skinny" (at 200 lbs!), offered a size-22W blouse (at a time when I was wearing a 14 or 16, depending on the cut at the bust line), and given what was described as a celebratory bag of chocolates, by three different friends, all in the same week. I understand that would-be saboteurs do not always recognize their own motivation. Mostly, though, I have come to the conclusion that it's all part of the same cycle, a cycle rooted in the idea that we, as women, are never enough.

My friend Julie was here the other day, and she said something about how good I looked. I blew her off, saying that I was still a few pounds up from where I was last summer before my string of injuries and general slugginess derailed me a bit and that my clothes weren't quite fitting me the way I wanted to yet. We went back and forth for a bit until she yelled, "JUST TAKE THE FUCKING COMPLIMENT!"

She was totally right. So here's what I'd like you to do, friends: give a compliment today, maybe even to yourself, and force its acceptance. If you can't cut the negative self-talk in yourself, try to catch it in someone you love, and point it out to her. Tell a woman you care about that she's talking to herself in a way that she wouldn't talk about her friends—or allow anyone else to talk about her friends. Tell her why she's awesome. Tell her why she's an inspiration. Tell her why she's a badass. Tell her to take the fucking compliment.

Five Things that Don't Suck, Running Edition

1. running
2. good music
3. surprising the hell out of people when you can say "Good morning!" without sounding like you're dying
4. knowing the gnats can't catch up with you
5. a really big glass of water afterwards

Five Things that Don't Suck, Race Day Edition

1. going back to what was my first 5K to run it again
2. the realization, after having announced that I'm in terrible shape, that I'm in better shape than I was the first time I ran this thing
3. the further realization that it's pretty tough to run 3 miles if you're actually in terrible shape
4. running outside for the first time since last fall sometime
5. running

Out with the Old (Goals), In with the New (Goals)

Well, here we are, Day 1 of a new year. All of my numbers reset today, and it's time to be thinking about new goals. It's been time for at least a week now, but I haven't been able to come up with anything I'm truly happy about. How did I do with last year's goals, you asked? Glad you mentioned it.

Last December, I made a goal for 2013: I wanted to run 750 miles over the course of the year and walk 250, for a grand total of 1,000 miles on my feet. The walking goal was sort of a "gimme"—five miles a week wasn't that big a deal, really, especially since I'd walk at least three miles doing the warm up and cool down from my run, but the running goal was a stretch. It required an average of 15 miles a week, and by the end of 2012 I was lucky to be running ten.

Despite a knee injury that cut my ability to run way back during the second half of the summer and a chunk of the fall, I ran 803 miles in 2013. I actually ran a bit more than that—there are a couple of weeks in there where I got busy and apparently didn't log my runs but instead just wrote a series of question marks. I have no idea what I was thinking, but I was under quite a bit of stress, so I'm not really surprised. But 803 is what the numbers add up to, so that's what I'm claiming for the year. On top of that, I walked 450 miles even (really), for a grand total of 1,253 miles on my feet last year.

If you had told me two years ago that this was possible, I would have called you crazy. All of a sudden (if 22 1/2 months can be considered "all of a sudden"), I can run 10-minute miles without straining my breath, and faster if I want to work. I have a better balance. I eat better. I sleep better. I survived the most difficult two years of my life and came out the other side feeling clear and, if not in control, at least relatively comfortable with the things I can't control. Mostly, though, I feel capable—the word I usually use is mighty—and able to do just about anything I set my mind to.

Other exciting things happened in 2013, and I hope things will get even better in 2014, but for now, this is good. So where do I go from here?

I've been trying to think about good goals for myself. Manageable, but challenging goals, goals that will keep me motivated and interested. I often have a writing goal for myself for a year, but right now what I really need to do is write some poems while I figure out what's next, not just in terms of creating a second manuscript but of figuring out what I want to say next. It's coming to me as I write, and I want to leave myself open to whatever shows up, so I guess the closest thing to a writing goal I can come up with is this: Just write.

That's harder for me than it sounds. I like to count things. I like specific challenges. I like focus and drive and quantifiable success. Success for me, this year, is going to be measured not in how much I write or how often but in what I find to say. And yes, figuring that out is going to mean making time to write and time to think and time to read and time to dream. But in general, it's going to mean letting go of my need to justify myself and just allowing myself to be a poet. If you know me, you know what kind of challenge I'm setting for myself here.

As for running, I think maybe an even thousand miles sounds good for this year. And rather than setting a walking goal, I've been thinking that maybe I'll just set an on-my-feet goal of 1,500 miles for 2014. Fifteen hundred miles on my feet, with a thousand miles of them running. Sounds like a plan. I'll let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, friends, please don't set resolutions about what you aren't—I'll be better about housework, I'll move more, I'll lose that 40 pounds, I'll spend less time on the internet, I'll stop eating sweets—and think about setting goals for what you want—I'll find my own kindness, I'll be good to myself and others, I'll recognize the good in myself and nurture it. Like most worthwhile endeavors, it's easier said than done, so we'd best get started.

Falling Off the Wagon: Was She Pushed, or Did She Jump?

When you grow up with a mother who makes her living working with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, you learn a lot of colorful expressions. And if you're a kid, you're likely to misinterpret some of them. Fall off the wagon comes to mind as one of the most common (and least swear-ridden), and I knew I needed to write about it when I looked up the origins and the very first site that came up in my highly-academic-and-not-at-all-half-assed Google search mentioned Robert Downey, Jr. It's a sign, I thought. Then I got a little sidetracked thinking about RDJ for a while, and when I came back from my Happy Place, I was already halfway through writing this opening paragraph. If you'd like to take a minute or ten right now to think about RDJ yourself, I encourage you to do so. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Good? Good. Okay. So I guess there used to be a thing called a water wagon. It was horse-drawn, and would roll through town spraying down the streets in the summer months. When the expression fall off the wagon came into being, using the image of a water wagon to describe someone who was drinking water instead of spirits made perfect sense. When I was a kid, though, I just figured the phrase came from the idea of a sort of Western-expansion-era drunk driving: he was so drunk, he fell off the wagon. Or maybe it had something to do with that bandwagon I'd heard so much about, the one people always seemed to be jumping onto. I didn't know. I also thought the expression was doggy-dog world, which I found perplexing because it didn't seem like such a bad thing to me. What do you want? I was a little kid. Moving on.

I've been thinking a lot about whatever you want to call it—backsliding, relapse, wagon-falling-off-of—in terms of my running. Since August, I haven't run much. My weight has remained relatively stable (at my peak, I was up about 3 pounds, right at the top of the normal 5-pound-or-so range I seem to have), and while the lack of long runs lately has cut my calorie burn, it's also cut my appetite. In other words, things seemed to be holding fairly steady despite my relative lack of exercise.

This little break hasn't been entirely by choice. I lost my footing on a trail run at the beginning of August and pulled a quad pretty seriously. I'm not sure if that accident is what triggered the pain in my opposite knee, but something happened there as well over the next couple of weeks and I couldn't seem to shake it. I'd take a few days off, have a good, relatively short, run where I felt strong, and then feel pain during the next run, or during a walk two days later. I replaced my shoes. I slept with my knee wrapped in an ace bandage (it helps). I iced. I elevated. I rested.

I want to make it crystal clear here that I'm not a run-through-the-pain kind of runner. I am, and have been from the beginning, a stop-running-if-it-hurts kind of runner, because I've tried to keep a long-term perspective on my running. Running through pain might be admirable in the short term (although I can't imagine why), but if you continue to run through pain, you will pretty quickly reach the point where you cannot run. Like, at all, ever. And I want to be able to run for a very long time indeed. So when I talk about knee pain here, please note that I'm talking relatively minor pain—more than discomfort, but not enough to make me grit my teeth. I'm not a medical professional, and I've said before that you really don't want to take medical advice from a poet, even if her mom did make a living as an R.N., but my total layperson advice if you're regularly in pain when you run is to see a doctor before you run any more. Don't risk permanent damage.

This pain/no pain cycle lasted for weeks—long, frustrating weeks, yes, but also weeks where I suddenly realized that I'd freed up a lot of time. I didn't have to figure out how to stack my day so that everything could get done. I didn't have to pull dinner together while simultaneously trying to refuel, hydrate, and not cool down so much I started shivering before I could get into the shower. For that matter, I didn't have to plan dinners whose preparation included a chunk of down time large enough for me to get cleaned up before we ate. I didn't have to worry about the dogs dragging a freshly showered, wet-headed me out into the cold (because of course their favorite time to go outside, no matter how recently they've gone, is after I get out of a shower). I cut an entire load of laundry out of my weekly chore list, based solely on the lack of workout gear and extra towels. On top of all that, this break came during the beginning of the semester. I was back on campus, back to grading, back to having to fit the rest of my life in around my teaching schedule.

I was a little frightened by how easily my attitude about running shifted. Before I got hurt, I looked forward to my runs, especially the long ones. I looked forward to seeing what I could do, to persisting through a 10- or 12-mile effort, to feeling physically strong and capable in a way that I've been able to manage only since I started running. I read Runner's World and running blogs and books about running. I enjoyed the way food had become fuel to me and the way my definition of comfort food had changed. Eventually, I stopped doing all the above. It wasn't a good idea for me to take long runs, or do speed work, or hill work. Many days, it wasn't a good idea for me to run at all. And if I couldn't run, I didn't really want to read about people who could. And if I didn't have to worry about how my diet would affect my run, it didn't matter what I chose to eat.

Except it did matter. I started finding reasons—excuses, really—not to walk, not to practice yoga, not to worry about much of anything in terms of my health. My clothes still fit as well as they do these days, meaning most of them were still too big for me, so I figured it would be okay. I'd get back to the program, such as it is, when I felt better. Sometimes a girl just needs a break. The month of October was particularly bad for this kind of thinking. Yes, I needed the break. Yes, I needed to let my body do its work and heal my knee. But the thought patterns were familiar and unwelcome.

That kind of thinking began to scare me. I ate a ridiculous amount of Halloween candy, even taking into account the fact that my definition of "a ridiculous amount of candy" has changed considerably in the past two years. I ate compulsively. I ate when I was not hungry. I—and I am not at all proud of this—found myself putting the wrappers into different waste baskets in the house so that I wouldn't be confronted with the visual evidence of what I had done to myself that week. Of all the disturbing behaviors I found myself slipping back into, that one troubled me the most. It's disordered eating, evidence that I was putting having more in front of everything else, despite the fact that I did not in any way need—or even want—more. I recognized the mindset all too well. I haven't changed a bit, I caught myself thinking more than once.

And then I reached the point where I realized everything has changed. Because I stopped. I just stopped. I decided I'd try going back to the treadmill for my runs. I figured the treadmill had worked for me during the entirety of my first year of running. It helped me take off that first hundred pounds, and do so without injury. I don't like it as much as running outside, but it's easier on my knees and I console myself by catching up on television via Netflix and my iPad. Most importantly, if it worked, I knew I'd be able to find my way back to myself. I don't know how I knew this—I suspect it had to do with the hope that I'd had success with it before—but I knew it as well as I know my middle name (which is not "Danger," an oversight for which I might never be able to forgive my parents).

The difficult part was remembering that I was no longer in 30-mile-a-week shape. I used to run ten or twelve miles for my long run on the weekends; over the past couple of months, I'd been lucky to run ten miles total in a week. I needed to remind myself that, while I was still in good shape, I wasn't in half-marathon shape. I wasn't in new-speed-record shape. Two weeks ago, I started with an easy three-miler. A couple of days later, I did another one. Then a third. I watched a bunch of documentaries about vegetarianism and veganism and happiness. By the end of the week, I'd run eleven easy miles with no pain. This past week, I increased two of the runs to four miles, and logged fourteen miles total. I've moved on to watching documentaries about the amazing machine that is the human body (some of them kind of gross, but I'm okay with that. Having a nurse for a mother can do that to you).

During this process, I've reminded myself of the multiple reasons I love running. I've begun feeling strong again. Capable. In control. Jed and I were already eating better, in general, than a lot of people we know—more vegetables, less meat, less junk food—and we renewed our commitment to those choices. We added in a resolution to cut our meat consumption even further by deliberately including more vegetarian dinners in our week. We were already usually keeping vegetarian for breakfast and lunch, and usually for dinner once a week, although not necessarily through a conscious decision. I made another loaf of bread, made some more soup, walked past the half-price Halloween candy in the supermarket.

We don't always fall off the wagon—sometimes, we're pushed. Sometimes, we forget to fasten our old-timey western seatbelts and end up being tossed around a little bit but manage to stay on board. I think for the past couple of months, I've been riding on the running board of the wagon, hanging on by my fingers. I had the choice to pull myself back up or to jump off, and I chose the former. The thing is, taking care of ourselves sounds like work, and we tend to describe it in terms that evoke effort—working out, getting to work, working on myself, working on my eating, working harder, not slacking off. But I'm telling you right now that taking care of myself is far less work than not taking care of myself. "Slacking off" is what takes the effort. Making excuses. Finding time to nap because I'm not sleeping as well. Maybe feeling a little gross after I eat instead of feeling fueled. Berating myself. Worrying. I feel better when I eat well. I feel better when I exercise. I sleep better. I have more energy. I look better (or maybe I don't—maybe I just see myself as looking better, because I don't beat myself up about that particular aspect of my life).

I'm on the wagon, and I have no plans to fall—or jump—off. I love this particular wagon. I love the ride. And I love my doggy-dog world.

Bonus: Books and Books and Books

Hey, all, guess what? My chapbook, Dear Turquoise, is out. You can read a sample poem (and order a copy if you want) from Dancing Girl Press. I'm proud of the poems, and I love the cover that Kristy Bowen designed.

I realize it's been pretty quiet around here lately, but it's all for good reasons. I've put together a second chapbook, called Creature Feature, which should be out soon. It's a collection of poems centered on the Universal monster movies of the '30s and '40s. I've been writing new work and trying to get it out in the world. I've been working on editing an anthology for poets and workshop leaders (more on that later), working on writing my own part of that anthology, editing two upcoming poetry collections from Cider Press Review, reading my way through my poetry library, and teaching. I've also been working on two guest posts for other blogs, and I'll post links to those when they go up. In short, All-Poetry Autumn has been amazingly productive so far, and I'm trying to go with it, mindfully and with gratitude. On top of that, I've been managing to get some running in, despite nursing a minor injury for the past couple of months (don't panic, Mom. It's nothing serious).

Which reminds me: I also have a couple of poems in the upcoming anthology Bearers of Distance:Poems by Runners. A portion of sales benefit the One Fund, to support the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, so it's a worthy cause and a worthy book. And it got a review on NPR's show Only a Game. Cool, huh?

I do have a lot to tell you about, and I will. But for now, follow one of the links up there. Read a poem. Get a copy of the book or the chapbook if you like. Or go crazy and get both—I'm not gonna stop you.

Shameless Plug for Bearers of Distance (Poems by Runners)

Hi all,

Just a quick note to let you know that I've got two poems in this way cool anthology from Eastern Point Press. Half of the profits are going to The One Fund, to support victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. I'm proud to be a part of it, and hope you'll support it.

You may now return to your regular ad-free blog, already in progress.

Off with the Old, On with the New

Maybe you know this about me already: I don't like to shop. I call myself cheap, but I'm not—I gladly spend money on friends and family members, I firmly believe that large purchases should be the best whatever-you're-buying that you can afford, Jed and I donate money to charity. We tip very well, we pay our taxes, we help out friends and family from time to time as need be. I buy a lot of books directly from small poetry presses, because I believe in what they do. All that kind of stuff. And I don't care about things—there are precious few objects in this world that I think of as, well, precious, and most of those are valuable for sentimental reasons.

I do, however, take care of my things, but not for the reason most people probably think I do. I take care of my things because I find waste arrogant. Please don't get me wrong—everyone needs to make his or her own decisions on these issues, and priorities are going to be different for everyone. I just wrote—and deleted—a whole long paragraph talking about the ways in which I deviate from my ideals, but it was boring, so I won't make you read it. You're just going to have to trust me when I say that I truly believe everyone is capable of making individual decisions about this stuff, and since I'm living in a glass house over here, I'm not looking for any good throwing stones. Hell, I'm not even wearing my glasses at the moment, so I probably couldn't hit anything even if I tried.

The bottom line is that Jed and I would generally rather buy quality items and repair them rather than replace them. And since I'm not a fan of the work involved in repairing them, I try to take care of them to begin with, whether this means not dunking our 20-year-old wooden salad bowl into soapy water to clean it or making sure our even-older cast iron skillet gets well dried out after we use it or trying to keep up on routine car maintenance. I find waste arrogant, and being wasteful goes against my environmentalist leanings, which might, now that I think of it, be part of why I find it arrogant. I know things need to be thrown away, but if I can limit the amount of those things—through taking care of my stuff so it lasts longer but also through things like  composting, recycling, and refusing wasteful crap when it's handed to me (seriously, why on earth would I need to put a bag of potatoes INTO A SECOND BAG in order to carry it out of the store?)(and before you get all Ah-HA! You should be buying loose potatoes and putting them in your own bags! let me just stop you by saying that my store doesn't sell loose organic potatoes and I do bring my own bags. Plus, you need to go re-read the paragraph above this one, since you obviously weren't paying attention to my little I'm-not-judging-because-nobody-is-perfect spiel.  So there, you pedant). At any rate, a better word than "cheap" is probably "frugal," but "frugal" conjures up images of dowdy women sitting on hard wooden furniture, darning socks by the light of a candle made out of the drippings gleaned from the birthday cakes of her younger, more extravagant relatives. With "cheap," I can at least enjoy the hyperbole.

I have also, since I started running, gotten really into buying used when I can. For the past year and change, most of my clothes have come from Goodwill or other thrift stores (mostly Goodwill, because there's a pretty good one close to me). I'd say that I rarely buy anything new, but a ridiculous number of the items I've bought from Goodwill have come with the tags still on them. A pair of $130 wool Michael Kors pants for six bucks? Why yes, thank you, don't mind if I do. My love for thrift shopping has risen dramatically as my sizes have shrunk because I really am too cheap to buy an entire new wardrobe every season, which is pretty much what I have had to do. I live in New England, where the seasons are actual seasons—by the time it gets warm enough again for me to pull out the skirts I was wearing just a week or so ago, they will no longer fit. Nor do any of the clothes I was wearing last winter, with the exception of a couple of  sweaters that are meant to be oversized (but are getting kind of ridiculous even so).

All this to say that this morning, after yet another run where my pants started sliding down my hips somewhere in the second mile, I decided today was the day where I would bite the bullet and pick up some new running clothes. I'd been keeping an eye out for them all summer in Goodwill, and managed to pick up a couple of things—a long-sleeved wicking shirt here, a short-sleeved-but-tighter-weave shirt there. There was no luck with pants, though—running clothes in general take a beating, and running pants probably bear the brunt of it (although bras certainly earn their keep) in terms of friction and all sorts of other issues you can probably figure out if you've ever, you know, worn clothes. I just couldn't find anything used that was still in good shape, and the same went for jackets. I do know that runners get very attached to the clothing they have that works for them, and tend to wear it into the ground, and that they get loyal to their brands, so there's not a lot of this-doesn't-fit-right going on out there. Or maybe we're all hoarders. I'm not sure. In any event, the pickings at Goodwill were slim. And it's getting chilly out there.

I managed to spend over $250 on clothes today—mostly for me, although I did get a pair of running pants for Jed—and I'm not done. I'm going to need a couple more pairs of pants or tights if I'm going to keep running outside this winter (which I am). On the plus side, I didn't have any kind of panic attack. I found a pair of running tights that are made out of recycled plastic bottles, which may have assuaged my guilt a bit. I got two jackets of different weights, which will get me through the winter. I got a pair of long-sleeved wicking shirts and some tights to help me get a little more wear out of my heavier skirts before I shrink out of them, too, and four camisoles (also very tough to come by used) because they're part of my teaching uniform in the colder weather. There was probably some other stuff that I'm not remembering right now.

And it's supposed to make me feel good, right? People have been telling me things like how I deserve it, or otherwise talking in ways that imply that they think shopping is some kind of reward. I "get" to buy new clothes—it's one of the great "advantages" of losing weight, this justification of shopping, of spending money on myself. As a Facebook friend (and fellow poet and runner) was saying earlier today about her own process, I'm supposed to feel like I am somehow better, more complete, more acceptable, because I am smaller. I'm supposed to hate my larger clothes and be happy to be rid of them because they are representative of a time when I was, despite my size, less than. And that's troubling enough, but the added layer of fulfillment that I'm supposed to get just from buying crap? I don't get it.

It doesn't feel wasteful—I'll get my outgrown (ingrown?) workout clothes as scrubbity clean as I possibly can and donate them along with the rest of the stuff I can no longer wear. One of my friends will probably take some of it; my mom might take some of it when she's up for Thanksgiving; the rest of it will get donated and someone will get a bargain. But it also doesn't feel like I am in any way completed by the process. What I feel is a vague satisfaction that I won't freeze my ass off on my next run, either because my pants aren't warm enough or because they're falling to my knees. I'm pretty happy about one of the jackets because I haven't had a spring/fall weight jacket in well over a decade, and I'm sick of having to choose between freezing and wearing a winter-weight jacket when it's only about 45 degrees out. And because it'll do double-duty as an outer layer for running on really cold days. Plus, it's cute and sporty and makes me feel like an athlete—a fast athlete. A fastlete. Did I need any of that stuff? Well, the pants, probably, yeah. But the rest of it? I probably could have figured out a way to manage. Will having it make my life easier? Yes, both because it will take away an excuse to keep from running and will keep me comfortable while I'm doing so.

But does it make me complete? Is it somehow reinforcing the idea that I am deserving? I can't say that it does. And I'm more than a little worried about the idea that it is somehow supposed to. I've been writing—and reading—some really good poems lately. I've got great students in my classes this semester (as usual). I've got projects in the works that I'm excited about and a manuscript that feels…fully cooked, somehow, and despite the fact that I've been nursing a persnickety knee for most of the summer, I kicked total ass in a 5K last weekend (Seriously. I broke my 5K personal record by over ninety seconds and left Jed in the dust and—most importantly—finished feeling good and strong) and have twice in the past week broken the 10-minute-mile mark for the last half mile of my run and felt fabulous doing so instead of spent. I feel powerful and mighty. I've been amassing a collection of really sweet notes and emails and such from people I haven't met, complimenting my work. I have a job I love and a creative life that fulfills me and a husband and home I adore and two hilarious dogs.

Jockey, as much as I love them, doesn't make running tights that can give me any of that (although they can help with the whole running well thing, so props to them for that). My Columbia jacket is going to keep me warm, but it's not going to make me complete no matter what size it came in. Would owning these socks or this underwear make me feel like a more valuable human being?

Well, okay. You got me there.

But generally speaking, no. At the risk of sounding preachy, we really need far less than we think we do, and beyond that, far less than we want. Another Facebook conversation earlier this week (although this time with people I actually know relatively well) dealt with gratitude, specifically with this gratitude study. I encourage you to watch the video, but I'll say here what I said then: I know for a fact that people who practice gratitude are happier, and that the biggest differences can be seen in the people who need it most desperately. I often say that running saved my life, in more ways than just the physical benefits—and I believe it. But so did stumbling into the routine of listing, most every day, five things that don't suck. The bar is set deliberately low, but it is still a way of acknowledging gratitude. Buying more shit won't make anyone happy, not for long. The happiness that brings is fleeting at best, especially if, like me, you're not a fan of shopping. But gratitude just gets better. It always fits, you don't need a receipt to return it, and it's always the perfect color. What more could I want?

Except those socks. I really, really want to be grateful for those socks. (Jed thinks they're crazy, by the way. Boys. Snort.)

Why Does It Matter Where You Come From?

I'm in the early stages of writing an essay—an actual academic essay, not a blog post—about poetry and place (don't panic, non-poets—there's not a ton of poetry talk here. Not today, anyway). As preparation for this, I've been reading a lot about place—essays by Emerson, the fabulous book The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (who, even though he died seven years before I was born and looked like the love child of Santa Claus and Tolstoy, has become one of the dear loves of my life), essays on poets.org, you name it. But I've also been thinking about my own sense of place. If you've read more than two of my poems—and maybe if you haven't—the following essay won't be much of a surprise to you. Mostly, I'm trying to get my head around how I feel about place, in an attempt to get a handle on it for the essay. I figured I might as well work it through here.

"Why does it matter where you come from?" –random question from the internet found while looking for articles on place

"No matter where you go, there you are." –quote from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension, here largely because I couldn't resist including it. My blog, my rules.

Image, for me, almost always begins in place—a room, a house, a yard, a body of water, a shoreline. My own work is so grounded at the water that I have trouble escaping it. The most evocative place in the world for me is the shore—a salt water shore in particular, and a specific stretch of beach in Rhode Island where I spent my summers growing up, if we're going to get particularly particular.

In a lot of ways, everything I am comes from that beach—from the house that my great grandfather built, from my grandparents who lived in it, from the family they raised and what remains or is lost of that family. My understanding of the world grew with my understanding of that house and what took place there. A large part of my relationship with Turquoise was formed there, for example. Sometimes it feels like all of my arguments and and all of my losses and all of my solace are there. Plus, probably a lot of other things.

It is only recently that I have begun to differentiate between the shore and the coast—I have always been drawn to "shore" as a word, and while I haven't deliberately defined it as that thin stretch of land where the water ends and the land begins (as opposed to "coast," that thin stretch of land where the land ends and the water begins), I think the difference in definition is something I have always understood. I know also that I am of the water, that I belong in it rather than on it or beside it, that whatever vaguely terrestrial nature I possess is a lie. I feel, at most, amphibious much of the time. For a stretch of years, the shore lost its solace for me—the losses piled on too quickly and deeply and I couldn't take comfort in the scent or the ease of my movement in the waves or, really, anything at all. It became an incredibly painful place for me to be. I say that I tried to break up with the ocean, but it wouldn't let me go. And while I knew that I needed to find my own place, to restore or create my own sense of home, I couldn't find my way to it. As it turns out, the ocean and I have kissed and made up in recent months, but I can't tell you how it happened. And I still know that I need to create my own home somewhere on the water. There's time for that.

The attraction of the shore is, for me, the same one that calls hatchling turtles out under the moon, but it is also one of being at a place where nothing is stable. There's so much water in the sand that it moves underfoot, and if you stand where the waves can wash over your feet, you will find yourself slowly sinking. Bits and hints of the deeper world show up there, and pieces of ancient history. Shards of glass get softened from daggers into jewels. All the interesting stuff happens when we start mixing things up.

The same is true of people. The people I find really interesting are the ones who struggle. Struggle is the greatest affirmation of life—if we didn't care, we wouldn't fight, yes? The struggle, for me, is itself full of hope. The point of describing the dark is that it is an attempt to map our way through it, because we have no hope of fighting without a map. When water and ground try to occupy the same space, things get dicey. We sink or stick or ruin our clothes. Not earth, not sea—it's the most difficult place to stand upright, and yet there's not enough water for us to lie down and swim. The shore is all struggle and shift. It's contradiction and, because of tides, not the least bit constant. The shore at 4PM is literally in a different place at 8PM and yet another at midnight. In August, in Rhode Island, the sun can be scorching, but the water is almost always cold enough to be painful at first. My beach is boulder and stone and sand—it doesn't choose. It mingles. It changes. Last May, I stood with a friend on a flat patch of sand, drank a toast to Turquoise, and poured the rest of the champagne into the water. In August, the same stretch of beach was almost impassable—the sand gone, everything was rock and algae, slippery in the rising tide, with whole and partial blue crab shells littering the pools. Same beach, same point in the cycle of the tides, wholly different place.

The ocean hides and exposes. It pushes and draws. It dulls colors and reflects them more brightly. It does all of these things simultaneously. I know there are other places on Earth where I can be outside and feel the enormity and insignificance of the planet and my place on it at the same time. I'm sure that if I stood in a field in the Midwest or in a desert in the Southwest and looked toward the horizon, I would have a similar experience of being able to see farther than I can actually see, see until the world curves down and away from my vision. And maybe it would be the same in some ways as standing in the wash, looking out past the point where I can differentiate between waves. I know that I can sit in the sun at a freshwater lake and put my feet in the water and feel chilled, that fresh water can buoy me, that it can hide a world away from me, and that experience sometimes—sometimes—feels something like being at the shore. I know that I can stand in amazement in a forest or at the side of a river or in any number of natural, largely untouched places because I have done these things.

And I like the creepy-crawlies of the earth, generally speaking. I, for example, fucking love slugs—that's right, just saying that I love them is not enough. I need a swear. I think some of them are gorgeous and they're so weird and alien and slow and deliberate and fragile and destructive. Just like us. Jed and I started keeping bees this year, and we love them—I feel a deep love for the bees, for their complicated survival, for how gently they'll explore me when I approach the hive and how cluelessly they'll bounce off me if I happen to wander, Mr. Magoo-style, through their flight path. I love land-bound creatures and flying creatures and creatures that move in between land and water. I love trees—really big ones, tiny saplings, it doesn't matter—and, yes, flowers (especially the ones with bees!) and ferns and mosses and butterflies and ladybugs and worms.

But the fact remains that the other day on my run, I crossed a little patch of driveway that was littered with acorns. Many of them had been crushed; some of them hadn't seen the difficult side of a tire; some of them were halved, somehow, and hollowed. The one I noticed, however, had been pressed down from the top until it cracked into arched segments, then laid on its side—sort of like how a pumpkin shell would look if you were able to peel it in a single strip from the flesh and lay it down, skin-side up. Except I didn't think of a pumpkin. I thought, "Squat lobster." Then I thought, "Or maybe trilobite." I try to write about bees and end up writing about how they've turned our birdbath into a beach—they've really turned it into a watering hole, but that's not the way my brain works. It's not my imagery. I see fireflies and think of them lifting in glittering masses over the salt marsh. I see myself in shadow, on a walk with Jed, and my hair is bouncing up and down, pulsing. I call it "jellyfishing."

Where I come from matters because where I come from is who I am.

Five Songs ("Things") that Don't Suck, Unless You're Running Edition

1. This is Hell
2. You Tripped at Every Step
3. Nowhere Road ("It's a nowhere road and I'm tiiiiiired...")
4. Working in a Coal Mine ("Oh! I'm sooo tiiired!")
5. Get Out of My Dreams (Get Into My Car)

Becoming Visible

Note: If you have been missing the vast quantities of swearing of which I am capable, desperately longing for me to drop an f-bomb or two (or, um...10? I'm afraid to count), then this is the post for you. If you have somehow been living under a rock and don't know that I curse like the love child of a long-haul trucker and a sailor, and will somehow be offended by that, then this is probably not the post for you. Fair warning, people.

So. I apparently used to be invisible. I didn't realize this at the time—and I'm not sure how, exactly, a 5'8", 300 pound woman is supposed to be invisible, but I'm being confronted with more and more evidence that this was, in fact, the case. Here is how I know: when I'm running, people see me.

I mean, a lot of people. A lot. Pretty much everyone I pass says good morning to me (other runners sometimes just wave or nod—I'm counting that, too). About a week ago, a woman in a pickup truck beeped and gave me a thumbs-up as I was doing my speed work. I was working hard, but not so hard that I thought I needed a boost. Turns out, a boost is great, whether you need it or not. The other day, on an easy jog, I passed a man who said, "Way to go!" It didn't seem like he was being creepy or overtly, um, overt—and I have to say it bothers me that we still live in a world where this is even a consideration—he was just being supportive to a stranger who was running past him.

Pretty much every time I go out for a run or a walk, people talk to me. I have, I should note, always been the person that the really short old ladies turn to in the grocery store when the tiny cans of tuna fish or beans or whatever have been placed too high (note to grocery store owners everywhere: take pity on the short older people of the world and put those things within reach, would ya? I know you're not going to do that, because eye-level is prime real estate and elderly shoppers are not your prime customers, but I also know that sucks). I sometimes joke that I have "Please talk to me" written on my forehead in ink that only crazy people and the elderly can see, but I think the reality is that I am the one who sees them, and sees them as full and complete people, something that often doesn't happen, and they recognize that somehow and respond to it. So I guess I should rephrase: I am used to being invisible unless someone needs something from me.

When you're obese, there are people who will treat you as if you are not human. They talk to you the same way they would talk to the television, say. That is, they recognize you as being basically humanoid, but they do not register you as an actual person. If they did, they wouldn't dream of saying the things that people have said to me (generally from a safe distance, like from a moving vehicle, which means that they do, on some level, understand that what they're doing is abhorrent. Which it is). I don't dwell on that stuff, and if pushed for details, I can only come up with two examples, although those examples are the reason I started walking with ear buds in several years ago.

These people, however, are in the minority. The vast majority of people will not recognize your existence. Or at least, they didn't recognize mine. I regularly said "Good morning" to people on the street, only to be completely ignored. I did not, generally, have to worry about men displaying a frightening level of familiarity with me—and when it did happen, if I told someone about it, they reacted with skepticism because, well, I was obese—why the hell would a man be interested in me sexually? Much of the skepticism came from people who love me, and from people who think that they are enigmas but who actually broadcast every thought they have across their faces. People who forget that I'm a writer and tune into these kinds of cues. People who, by their reaction, showed me that I was, in fact, worthy of being ignored.

The thing is, being invisible has its advantages. I'm a poet—one of the most invisible of artists—and that invisibility allows me to be fairly honest in the work I do, even when I'm making pretty much everything up (which I do, sometimes, kids. Poetry is not journalism). Knowing that plenty of poets don't even read poetry besides their own can free you up to write whatever you want because hell, if poets don't consistently read poetry, who does (I'm looking at you, accountants)? I also didn't usually have to deal with the kind of harassment that women, as a group, face every day. I didn't have to get into arguments about whether a wolf whistle from a stranger is a compliment (here's a hint, guys: it's fucking well not) or whether an uninvited hand on my thigh was someone just being playful (it's not) or any of the other issues that women argue about among themselves, never mind among men. I didn't have to worry about why the people who chose to be around me did so—they clearly wanted to be with me, the person, instead of me, the body. Being invisible does let people—men and women—appreciate your brain. Which I have. And your mind, which I also have (not everyone has both, it seems). It also means that people are regularly underestimating you, which I have often found helpful.

So it's a little weird, being seen again—not just as a woman, but as a human being. It's a little frightening. If friends are noticing that I've got amazing calf muscles (which I do, thank you very much), then it's a good bet that some stranger somewhere is noticing it, too, and that's just weird. (Stop staring at my calves, stranger! Stop it, right now! Go back to your accounting!) I am more self-conscious now than I was 100+ pounds ago, not less. For example, I am much less likely to leave the house without makeup (although I still don't wear a lot) or some kind of jewelry. And I think the tendency is for people to assume that it's because I've begun to care about myself, but that's not it at all. Instead, I've begun to care about what other people think. Which is really, really weird. And I do still believe that we would care far less about what other people think of us if we realized how very infrequently they do so. For the record. But I can't seem to help myself.

I get called brave on a fairly regular basis, which I think is kind of hilarious. The kinds of things people are talking about when they say this are not brave. I started running because I had a choice between running and dying, and I decided not to die (you're welcome). It wasn't as cut-and-dried as that, or even a deliberate decision, but that's basically what it boils down to: I needed control somewhere, and I took control in this particular aspect of my life. That's not brave; that's self-preservation. Continuing to run isn't brave, either. It's just running (I want to type, "It's just salvation"). Being willing to talk about it isn't brave, either. Plenty of people talk about this stuff. There are 170 million blogs—a statistic you can believe because I just made it up and I'm very, very trustworthy—about this kind of thing online. Bravery involves two things: fear and the willingness to carry on despite it. If either one of those aspects is missing, so is bravery. Bravery is not a lack of fear. It's just not. And even if you want to believe that I'm brave—and I can't stop you—I'd suggest that perhaps you might want to focus on people who are running into burning buildings or jumping onto train tracks to save someone else or defusing bombs or something. What I am is a hell of a lot closer to stubborn than brave.

Stubbornness, for me, has arisen in how difficult it has been to learn how to accept a compliment. Stubbornness has, for years, prevented me from cutting myself off at "Thank you." Stubbornness has stood in the way of me allowing myself to realize that external changes are not, in fact, of less value than internal ones and that recognizing them doesn't make me shallow, and neither does appreciating them. The changes come together, whether I want them to or not.

But it's not all bad, because stubbornness has served me well in other areas. Talking to a friend yesterday, I described it as "a healthy dose of fuck you," and having that attitude has, on many occasions, given me the strength to get through difficult times. That dose of fuck you is how I turn negatives into positives in a lot of ways. For example, when faced with the choice years ago between continuing to walk or stopping because I was hurt by something a stranger had yelled at me from a car, it was my healthy dose of fuck you that got me to put in ear buds the next day, turn the music up, and head out the door. And it's important to note that, like stubbornness, the fuck you is not necessarily directed at anyone in particular (although it certainly can be—and it was in the example above). If anything, it's mostly directed at myself. Fuck you, I'm going to walk. Fuck you, I'm going to accept this compliment without backpedaling or otherwise making it conditional, and fuck you some more because I'm going to leave my response at "Thank you"  (or my personal favorite: "Thank you. I feel great"). Fuck you, yeah, I enjoy the fact that I'm looking strong and healthy and all that and while we're at it, fuck you because I do know what this means for my development as a human being. Fuck you, I'm no longer invisible and I'm going out there anyway.

I advise you—not that you asked—to generate your own dose of fuck you, in whatever aspect of your life seems to need it. If you feel like no one is standing up for you. If you feel like you're being forced into doing something you dread. If—maybe especially—that force is coming by way of some sort of guilt trip, implying that you are somehow not enough  if you don't do A, B, or C. If you are worried about what "they" will think. If you are afraid you can't. Find the place in your life where you need a little stubbornness and cultivate the hell out of it. Because awesome calves don't make themselves, my friends.

Get Real

I'll be honest: I have a million things I should be doing right now, the most pressing of which involve getting the house ready for some good friends who are coming tomorrow for a few days. They'll overlap with yet another good friend who will be here for the weekend, immediately followed by a week-long poetry seminar out of state, for which I am not at all as well-prepared as I would like to be. We have several house-related issues that need to be taken care of NOW, not because we've been putting them off but because their timing is out of our control. For example, at the moment, Jed is out getting supplies to replace the toilet in the guest bathroom because it decided to give up the ghost. It needs both new internal mechanics and a new fill line, and it's an ancient beast to begin with, so we decided to just let it go. Unfortunately, the people who installed it in the first place decided they didn't need anything as fussy or new-fangled as a shut-off valve, so this decision has resulted in us needing to turn off the water to the entire house. For hours.

You know what it's tough to do without water? Get the house ready for guests. You know what else it's tough to do without water? Everything.

As I type this sentence, it's 8 o'clock and neither of us has considered dinner, and can't clean up for dinner even if we could figure out either what to make that doesn't involve, you know, water, or what to order for takeout.

And I can't concentrate. The perfect storm of stress that's been gathering lately arrived full-force over the past couple of days, and now—when I most need to be able to focus and produce—I find myself unable to accomplish much of anything. Being a poet doesn't require a lot of running water, but it does require an ability to think deeply and pay attention, two tasks I am 100% not up to at the moment. It's a hopeless, helpless feeling—guilt over not doing more, stress over getting the stuff I can do right, anger at things that are really, truly out of my control, more anger at my inability to shake off those very things (because, seriously, getting angry about being angry is just wasting my time TWICE).

I wish I could tell you that my response to all of this was to run and run and run until the endorphins kicked in and I came home sweaty on the outside and clean on the inside. Lightning this morning kept me inside on the treadmill, and the one-two combo punch of insane heat and humidity has made for less than pleasant runs both outside and inside for the past couple of weeks. I've been running, but the runs have left me feeling spent and cranky instead of strong and mighty. It is, I realize, a passing phase.

All this is somewhat off-topic preface to the fact that today when I saw someone on Facebook—someone I don't even know, I should add—make a crack about what a "real runner" does or does not do, I became irrationally enraged. Like, enraged beyond all measure over something that I'm pretty sure was an inside joke to begin with. I did not, I'm proud to say, engage that person, but because I have little to do besides think right now, here is what I would say on Facebook if it wouldn't make me look like a giant douchenozzle (note: it would):

Real runners run. That's what we do. Some of us take walk breaks, some of us don't. Some of us usually don't, but are willing to if we need to. We wear skirts and shorts and capris and tights (although generally, one would hope, not all at the same time). We wear singlets and t-shirts and tank tops and running bras except for those of us who don't. We cross-train and we don't. We love it and we don't. We do it for ourselves, for our families, for some unknown reason. Our favorite part is when we startle a pile of painted turtles into leaping into the river, except for those of us who feel bad when that happens, and those of us who couldn't really care less about whether the turtles are frightened and those of who either don't run past or don't notice turtles. Our other favorite part is when people point their sprinklers at the street on a hot morning, except for those of us who run at night and those of us who don't like sprinklers and those of us who think watering a lawn is insanely wasteful. We run at night, by the way. Or in the morning. Or at lunchtime. Or, you know, whenever the hell we run. We run on treadmills and love it, and we run on treadmills only when we have to (and call it the dreadmill) and we run in pools sometimes. We are chasing personal records, except for those of us who don't care about time or those of us who are aging out of our years of improvement or those of us who are focused on recovering from injuries. Real runners are fast and slow and everything in between. We have always been runners. We are just now realizing we are runners. We run on empty stomachs. We run on full meals. We run races. We run with partners. We run alone.

We—all of us, myself included—would be so much happier if we stopped worrying about whether we were "real" whatevers. Real poets (don't get me started on the Jean Luc Picard meme going around FB with "How the FUCK can you call yourself a writer if you don't write every day?" on it. My mom was a nurse, but she didn't go into the recovery room every day. My dad was an accountant, but he didn't, um, account every day. If you write every day, that's great, but people are different from each other. Nothing works for everybody, and why should writing every day be the exception? There's very little—including eating, sleeping, sex, and bodily functions—that we do EVERY day without fail. So get over it. Also, who got me started? I expressly declared that you should not get me started. This is all your fault)…where was I? Oh, yeah. Real poets, real teachers, real parents, real adults, real friends, real lovers, real artists, real people. Put whatever noun you want after the word "real"—it is, I suspect, liberating to be able to stop worrying about who qualifies as such a creature. I think it's part of human nature to doubt ourselves, and to create criteria to exclude others so that we can feel better about where we are. If we doubt that we are, in fact, a real runner, we can make rules that put us into the "real" category, and thus find satisfaction. Forget for the moment that it doesn't work, not in the long run at least. It doesn't stop us from trying.

So go on with your bad selves. Be runners. Or be whatever else it is that you want to be that you're afraid of being. And then, once you've allowed yourself to live there, open yourself up to other people who are afraid of being that thing. Be generous in your support. The best thing that happened to me as a freshly-minted poet was having "real" poets take me seriously. The best thing that happened to me as a new runner was having "real" runners take me seriously. If you haven't been taken seriously as a "real" whatever, then be the person you wish you'd met when you were starting. It doesn't take any more energy than creating boundaries, I promise. See what it opens up for you.

Extra points if what it opens up is my water shut-off for the house. But maybe that's just me.

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.

The First 100 Pounds (91 - 100)

All these posts later, and I still haven't had a chance to go to med school. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Talk to a professional before you decide a poet is a good healthy lifestyle role model of any sort.

Also, thanks to all of you who have commented, sent emails, posted, or otherwise been supportive of these posts (and of me in general). Oh, and there might be a little swearing. Nowhere near enough, if you ask me.

If you'd like to start at the beginning of the list, you can do so here. But here's 91 – 100:

91. I LEARNED TO HONOR MY "GOOD" TIMES OF DAY.

I am terrible between 3 and 5 PM. I just am. If I'm going to fall asleep during the day, that's when it's going to happen. So I don't try to run during those times (I can cross-train if I need to, but those are seldom my happiest workouts). If I'm going to get my best workout, I need to do it in the morning or start sometime between 5 and 6 PM. That's just the way my particular circadian rhythms seem to work—I could try to fight them if I wanted to, but the workouts are much smoother if I honor my good times of day.

92. I LEARNED MY OWN RHYTHMS.

I've talked about rhythms a bit in terms of things like understanding the weird, non-linear progression of weight loss, but it applies to other aspects of the process as well. There are a few days every month where I am simply ravenous, all the time. Sometimes, I can finish an entire meal, be fully hydrated, and still be painfully hungry. It's not, of course, actual hunger—maybe I'm in a muscle-building phase, or losing fat, or maybe it's just that something happens that crosses my hunger/satiety responses, but during these periods, something is going on with my body that I don't totally understand, and while it's uncomfortable, I've learned to go with it. I eat well, I make sure I have plenty to drink, and I have reasonable snacks when I just can't stand it anymore. I recognize the symptoms and know to ride it out. Giving myself the time to understand my own body rhythms—or at least recognize them—helps a lot.

93. I BECAME GRATEFUL TO MY BODY, "FLAWED" AS IT WAS.

And is. This was another tough one. It's hard to look at myself in the mirror and see the good. We're trained to see our faults—just one glance at my Facebook feed gives me ads for reducing belly fat, removing hair, buying some sort of garment or makeup or pill that will somehow make my hideousness more socially acceptable. I read articles that claim to be reviews of running clothes but actually talk about whether a specific pair of pants might make my ass look too big and not about how the garment actually performs. Again, it's too easy to focus on what I'm not instead of what I am.

There's a full-length mirror in our bathroom. For whatever reason, I started looking into it right before I got into my post-workout shower. It was not easy at first. I saw the wrinkles and the bulges and the sags. But I began working on establishing gratitude to my body, for getting through another run, for getting through another day, for getting stronger, for staying uninjured. It's ridiculous and touchy-feely-self-helpy, and it is very, very effective.

94. I BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND THAT I COULD HAVE ANYTHING I WANTED.

Because I can. I just can't have everything I want. Because no one can. The key is in figuring out what I want. If I want to run well, I can't have eggs benedict for breakfast that day. That doesn’t mean I can never have it again—it just means it doesn't fit into my plans for the day. If I want eggs benedict for breakfast, I can't have a good run later. Again, that doesn't mean I'll never run well again—it means I won't run well that day. Both options are available to me, just not at the same time. On any given day, one will win out over the other. I know, for example, that I can do a perfectly acceptable walking workout if I've had eggs benedict several hours before—so maybe I just switch a run day and walk day that week. Or maybe I've been eating out a lot because we've had a bunch of events in the past couple of weeks. In that case, I'll go with a lighter breakfast and a run. It's all available, and I can do anything I want—just not everything I want.

95. I ALLOWED MYSELF TO REDEFINE MYSELF AS AN ATHLETE.

This might be the toughest of all. I was not athletic in school. The only teams where I was picked first were ones for which my size (I got tall FAST, hitting my full height of almost 5'8" when I was about 11) was an asset: red rover, tug of war. (Note to all phys. ed. teachers: you know who the non-athletic kids are. Why the fuck don't you make them team captains once in a while so that the same 3 or 4 kids don't always end up being picked last? You asshats.)

Um…where was I? Oh, yeah. Athlete. It's a weird word for me—certainly one I've never had applied to me by anyone else. And a lot of my personality had been bound up in not being very good at sports. I don't have terribly good eye/hand coordination. I'm not great under that kind of pressure (although I'm fine under other kinds). I was never taught how to build myself up to the point that learning how to push myself athletically might be fun—I was just pushed to go faster, farther, more, whatever, always with the implication that whatever I was doing simply wasn't good enough. That pushing almost never included any versions of the words, "You can do it," and never seemed to take into consideration where I was physically.

But I can run twelve miles. More, actually, since it's not like I drop to the ground when those twelve are finished. I can hike hills like nobody's business. I can do push-ups and crunches and lift heavy things. I have the resting heart rate of an athlete. What else do I need to call myself an athlete? It's not a label that I wear comfortably yet, but it's one that I wear when I can.

96. I BECAME SUPPORTIVE OF OTHER RUNNERS.

Runners might be the most supportive people I've ever met. We're competitive, but largely with ourselves. The vast majority of people who enter races don't do so because they think they'll win—they're looking for a personal record, maybe, or they're doing it as part of their training for another race, or entering racing gives them a reason to keep up with their workouts. The running community is ah-may-zing, and I'm happy to be a part of it, so when a running friend of mine is injured, I ask how she's doing. If another posts to FB that he had a good run, I try to "like" it. Seriously, it doesn't take a lot, but being supportive helps keep me positive, and where's the downside to that?

97. I WRITE ABOUT IT.

Writing is how I process—how I come to understand myself and the events happening around me. Everything I've learned about myself during the past year and a quarter or so, I've learned through writing about it. You might process things differently, but for me, it's not "real" until I can write about it. Learning-through-writing applies to mourning, love, hatred, fear—the whole gamut of human emotion—but it also applies to this…what? transformation?...I've been making. What little understanding I have has come through writing.

98. I SAY HELLO TO PEOPLE I PASS ON MY RUNS.

Just to prove that I can, because the fact that I can speak sometimes surprises the hell out of people, and that's fun. Also, it's neighborly. The saying hi part, not the surprising the hell out of people part. I once realized as I was approaching a runner that we were wearing the exact same outfit. She gave me a little raised-fist-power-to-the-people salute (it was in the days right after the Boston Marathon bombings). I said, "Nice outfit." Then we were both gone in our opposite directions. It made me happier than it had any right to. There's a kid who likes to hang out in his yard and kick a ball around. We say hi every time I pass him (he started it—I don't accost children, even when they're behind fences). I have no idea who he is, but why not, right? And if someone doesn't return my greeting (this is, after all, Massachusetts), what have I lost?

99. I TRY TO LET GO OF WHAT I CAN'T CONTROL.

Like whether someone says hi to me. Or when, exactly, I drop another five pounds. Or whether a given person respects what I'm doing. Or whether a particular skirt fits yet or or or or or. I try my best to let all that go. It goes against the entire nature of my being, but I'm much more content when I can manage it.

100. I FORGET WHAT I LOOK LIKE.

In multiple ways. I force myself to forget what I look like when I run, because I'm sure it's not pretty. I also—despite looking into the mirror to try on clothes or give myself pep talks or practice a little gratitude—quite literally forget what I look like sometimes. A friend of mine took a picture of me a week or so ago, and when she showed it to me, I said, "Holy shit, am I really that skinny?" I'm not skinny (I'm on the cusp of overweight and obese), but I couldn't recognize my own body in that picture for a bit. I don't think of myself as being that size. When I was at my heaviest, it was pictures that showed me how large I was—I had trouble recognizing myself in those, as well. When I started losing weight, it was pictures that showed me where I was. The day-to-day visuals, for whatever reason, mean very little to me, but once in a while, I see a picture and it reminds me of what I look like now. It's a little weird, but I'm figuring it out. I'm figuring it all out.

The First 100 Pounds (81 - 90)

Potential conversation for you to have with yourself:

YOU: Hey! This is some sort of medical advice right here in this blog post!

YOU II: No, it's really not. This is written by a poet with no medical background whatsoever.

YOU: Okay. Perhaps I should talk to some sort of medical professional or something.

YOU II: Good idea, Smartypants.

If you want to start from the beginning, you can do so here. Here are 81 – 90:

81. I GET RID OF CLOTHES WHEN THEY'RE TOO BIG FOR ME

This was huge. I don't have fat pants and thin pants. When I shrink out of my clothes, I donate them to Goodwill or give them to friends who wear that size. I don't need a safety net, and when my clothes are too big I look like I weigh more than I do. So off they go to Goodwill, as quickly as I can ship them out. This all means that I'll never have a picture of myself standing in a single leg of one of my old pairs of jeans, and that's fine by me.

82. I SHOP AT GOODWILL. OFTEN.

Speaking of Goodwill, I am cheap. I hate the idea of spending real money on clothes that might, if I buy them a little small, fit me for a season. I also have problems with the politics of a lot of clothing retailers—I don't want to support businesses that outsource their labor to countries where factories are unregulated and dangerous. I don't want to support businesses that treat women like prostitutes or porn stars or objects. I know I can't avoid this completely (isn't that sad?), but if I get my clothes from Goodwill, I'm at least not supporting those brands, even if I end up wearing them. Buying used also fits in with my environmental efforts—no packaging, little-to-no transportation costs and fuel use, putting to use something that might otherwise end up in a landfill somewhere. Plus, it's possible to score really good, well-made, classic pieces at Goodwill. I've got clothes from L.L. Bean, Ralph Lauren, Ann Taylor, Eddie Bauer, and probably some places I can't think of right now. The most anything has ever cost me is $4.99, and some items cost $2.50, sometimes with the tags still on them. Sure, there's plenty of worn-out stuff at Goodwill, but if it's worn out, I don't buy it. Problem solved. Yes, someone I don't know has worn it before, but that's why we have washing machines (if the idea of this grosses you out, you probably don't want to know how many people touch your "new" clothes during the process of making them). Building a wardrobe this way takes patience, and it can be sad to try on a cool piece only to find that it doesn't fit, but it works for me.

83. I SPEND MONEY FOR NEW CLOTHES WHEN I NEED TO

That said, I prefer to have some basics. I like to own one pair of black pants, a black t-shirt and a white blouse—the rest of my wardrobe can rotate in and out of color palettes, but those three items go with almost anything else I might buy. I think about them as my essential teaching wardrobe, but the fact of the matter is that I want the same things in the summer: give me a pair of black capris and a white short-sleeved blouse and I am good to go. These things can be hard to find used in good condition. Think about it: you might stop wearing a certain shade of blue, or maybe your mom bought you a green shirt that makes you look like you died a week ago, but if you have a great black t-shirt, you wear that sucker into the ground. I also don't rely on Goodwill for special occasions. There are some events—like weddings and funerals—where I'm willing to shell out for the right dress, even if it means spending more money on one dress than I've spent on the rest of my wardrobe all year. This doesn't mean I don’t check Goodwill first—I do. I'm just prepared to spend money when I really need to.

84. I BUY TOOTSIE POPS

I have a problem with sugar. I get very involved with blood sugar swings, for one thing—I eat candy, my blood sugar spikes, it dips, I crave candy, I eat it, my blood sugar spikes…you get the picture. I've read a zillion studies and articles about studies, and I could give you a bunch of different potential reasons why I have trouble turning off the sugar once it's on, but I know about myself that I can't have sweets in the house. Not baked goods, not candy, not ice cream. I'm not going to say that I'm incapable of regulating my intake, but I'm damn close. I do know, however, that it is physically impossible for me to eat more than two Tootsie Pops in a single day—it would tear up my mouth Cap'n Crunch-style. So I always have Tootsie Pops in the house. If I'm craving something sweet, there it is, in a little single-serve, 60-calorie package. And—and I think this is the key to the whole thing—it takes me a long time to eat a Tootsie Pop. Think about, say, how many M&Ms you could eat during the time it takes to get through a Tootsie Pop—certainly enough to get into those blood sugar swings I was talking about. One lollipop takes care of my craving and takes long enough to eat that it doesn't kick off a cycle. They might be made of magic.

85. I GOT RID OF ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS ENTIRELY

I tell people about this a lot. I'm convinced (and there are studies that back this up, although there are others who disagree) that artificial sweeteners cause more sugar cravings than they fix. I know I was never able to get a handle on my sugar intake until I gave up artificial sweeteners. I traded "lite" yogurts for organic yogurts made with actual sugar, and then, eventually, for plain yogurt sweetened with my own fruit; I turned in my Diet Coke Fan Club membership; I made the decision that if I was going to have sweets, they were going to be actually sweet—usually made in my own kitchen, and for some sort of event that would help ensure they didn't stay in my kitchen. A few months after I gave up my one lonely Diet Coke a day, I had one. It was disgusting. It tasted like a bubbly combination of the can it came in and some sort of industrial solvent. Which is kind of what it is.

What little control I have over my relationship to sugar, I have—I am convinced—because I gave up artificial sweeteners. For a long time I had a rule that I wouldn't buy sweets. It wasn't that I couldn't have them; I just wasn't a person who bought them. It kept me from having them in the house, but allowed me to have dessert when, say, we went out for a special occasion or had guests for dinner. At this point, I'm learning how to manage sweets and how to mitigate the damage they do. If I'm dying for a candy bar, for instance, I'll often get a Twix, because I can hand one of the sticks to Jed. The point is that when I'm craving something sweet, there's probably a physiological reason, and eating an artificially sweetened whatever-it-is isn't going to address the issue that caused the craving, and so I'll keep seeking it out, whereas if I just eat actual sugar, and figure out how to restrain the portion? I’m good.

86. I EAT FAT. AND CARBS. AND PROTEIN. AND PLANTS.

Because our bodies need them. Do lots of people eat too many carbs? Yes. Yes, we do. Do we eat too much fat? Yes. Protein? Often. Plants? Probably not so much. Although I love steamed vegetables with a love beyond measure, I have never said, "I just can't stop eating these steamed vegetables!" and I doubt anyone else has, either. But lots of people eat too much in general. If I go on a low-carb diet, I'll lose weight, but it will largely be water weight AND I won't be giving my muscles the glycogen supply they need to help me run well. If I go on a low-fat diet, I risk robbing myself of the fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids (some of which my body cannot make) that I need to be healthy. I need it all—I just don’t need too much of it, and it's probably a good idea if I consider its sources.

87. I ADDED PROTEIN (AND FAT) TO MY BREAKFAST.

I was amazed at the difference this made. Half a cup of oatmeal plus applesauce and skim milk at 6:30AM = me hungry before 10:30. Half a cup of oatmeal plus applesauce and skim milk and about 15 grams of almonds at 6:30AM = me not hungry until after noon. An extra hundred calories of fat and protein buys me hours of satiety. If I'm going to have a long run that day, I'll add something to that breakfast: a bowl of cereal (the hours before a long run are not a good time to be adding fiber or worrying about excess carbs), or a hard-boiled egg, half an avocado, or a bit of peanut butter and honey on a piece of toast. Something like that. I'm going to need the energy.

88. I LISTEN TO CRAVINGS.

I've already said that if I'm having a lot of cravings for something specific, I usually eventually give into them. But I don't have a lot of cravings. When I start craving, say, ice cream, I wonder if it's because my body needs fat or calcium or sugar—or some combination. If I add a little more yogurt to my post-run snack or get a little more fruit into my diet and the craving goes away, I have my answer. It's not that I'm substituting one for the other. No one should ever try to convince me that yogurt with a handful of blueberries is "just as good" as an ice cream cone because all the people involved in that interaction know it's a lie. It's good in its own way, don't get me wrong. But it's not ice cream. Sometimes the craving is nutritional, and by meeting the nutritional need, I can get rid of the craving.  When all is said and done, if I still want the ice cream, I have it. And I love it. And all is right with the world.

89. I STOPPED THINKING IN TERMS OF "BAD" VS. "GOOD" WITH BOTH MY FOOD AND MY BEHAVIOR.

Eating broccoli is not "being good." Spending a day on the couch is not "being bad." If I say to myself, "I was good and ran ten miles today," then the next time my long run rolls around and, say, it's 90 degrees out (like it has been recently) with jaw-dropping humidity and I'm feeling a twinge in my left hamstring and it's the day before I'm supposed to get my period, but I manage to drag myself through eight miles before calling it a day, does that mean I'm bad? Of course not. Words are important. The way I talk to myself is important. I start most runs with the attitude that I will finish—it usually isn't even a question. If I'm not myself for whatever reason, I adjust that to, "Let's see what I can do," and far more often than not, I get to the end of my scheduled run. But behavior is just behavior. Food is just food. Look, brownies are delicious. Spending a whole day lying on a raft in the middle of a lake and lazily sipping something cool, fruity, and possibly alcoholic is also delicious in its own way. Then again, so is broccoli, and so is finishing a run strong.

90. I MAKE EXCUSES TO EXERCISE INSTEAD OF MAKING EXCUSES TO AVOID IT

This is related to prioritizing exercise, but it also has to do with me giving up the mindset that working out is something to get out of, like jury duty or dinner with relatives you don't like (I love my relatives, by the way, in-laws included). If I know I'll be spending a day with friends, I'll get up early and take a walk before breakfast so that I don't get lulled into taking a day off when  I end up not feeling like working out the evening after a day of socializing. It gets done first because it's the most important thing I want to do that day. Want to, want to, want to. Not need to. Not should. Want to.