Training Diary

What to do when you don’t know what to do

Zoey · January 20, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Have you ever noticed how when you are so overwhelmed about what you have to do, you do nothing? Because that’s pretty much how the human brain works. Helpful. But also very likely to happen during school holidays. I love school holidays. I love that I can have a sleep in and not make school lunches and we can do fun things and probably most importantly I don’t have daily battles about school uniforms and freaking socks and even more importantly I don’t have to worry about separation anxiety that happens during the year.

But the reality of school holidays is that as much as the girls are pretty good at entertaining themselves, I get almost nothing done. It’s not that I don’t have time, exactly. It’s more that I don’t have any focused or uninterrupted time. Every five minutes someone needs frozen raspberries or milk or second breakfast or that doll they didn’t care about but are now absolutely beside themselves desperate to find. All of which I tend to forget during term, because I have blocks of time to get stuff done so having to fulfil a list of demands at 5 minute intervals kind of flies under the radar when they are home.

At first you don’t really notice it because it’s novel and it’s Christmas but as I near towards week 5 and week 6 of my school holiday marathon I really notice it. It goes beyond work too, I can’t seem to stick to my regular training schedule either. I begin to have doubts about what I should be doing, the structure of my programming, all of it gets drown in a big bag of overwhelmed, indecisive second guessing.

Some of this might have something to do with packing up and moving and new mortgages and contracts, but still I’m pretty sure this happens every year. Or some version of it does. And it couples with this intense desire to treat the arbitrary new year date as some kind of beginning point for whatever I’m doing. But I don’t know what I’m doing. You see my problem.

The good news is I have an end point. We move on the 8th February, and we hand back the keys to our rental property a week later so we can get all the cleaning stuff done and the girls (thankfully) go back to school the week before that. You can withstand almost anything if you have an end point.

Even so, I don’t do a month of limbo very well, so I had to come up with something. I couldn’t face my normal sessions so I’ve just been running. Sometimes when you are a highly structured person, you can forget that this is a thing you can do. I often don’t really know how far or how long I’m going to go for, sometimes it’s slow, mostly it’s easy and sometimes I completely change what I’m doing half way through.

Going through a period of overwhelm it would have been really easy to do nothing. Write it off as a period where I just wasn’t going to be doing anything and settle in to my festivity slothdom and that would have been ok, but it wouldn’t have been great. I’m continually telling people in Learn to Run that you don’t need motivation to go, you can just go. So for this month, I’m just running. And the view from here is pretty outstanding.

Rebirth

Zoey · November 2, 2016 · Leave a Comment

I was sitting on the plane on the way home from Melbourne a few weeks ago and I got out my crocheting. I appreciate time away to catch up on crocheting because when I’m at home if I sit down I accidentally set off the ‘I need juice/milk/food/WHY DON’T YOU FEED ME alarm’.

“That looks really peaceful”

I looked up at the person sitting next to me and I had that kind of shock of someone recognising something in you.

“Yes it is.” And I could have gone off on a tangent about how I never get to sit down and do it at home and shifted into that kind of conversation that parents have to other parents. But I kind of just sat there in the moment and I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t dilute that spark of recognition with anything else.

“I feel peaceful just watching you do it.”

I think there is a great amount of joy in other people connecting to what you do – whether it is your writing or your running or even your crocheting. It can remind you that you are writing your own story. That you aren’t just wandering through having things happen to you.

I’ve been kind of in the hole for about three months now. It’s easy to see that in hindsight. But when you are in it, you don’t see it. Everything about it seems normal. Nothing seems out of place. And you manage, more than you live. It’s only when you look back on it that you can see that you were there and it seems so clear – neon sign clear. A reminder that it never really goes away, I just manage it better. Or I’m more able to stare into the abyss and tolerate it staring back at me.

It makes sense now. Creativity taking a nose dive into nothingness, extreme resistance to anything hard in my training. listening and reading less. Managing the internal is so demanding, there’s nothing left for anything external. It must seem boring to people on the outside. Boring and selfish. There’s so little room for any demands on time or energy beyond the absolute essentials. Depression IS depressing. And as much as it sucks on the outside of it, it’s a lot worse on the inside.

It’s funny. When you come out the other side, it’s like you leave the person who you were behind and a new one comes out. It’s like a rebirth. Or maybe it just feels that way because you aren’t being pinned down by the disease of your mind.

Either way, all you have to do is breathe in. And start.

Just because you can run a marathon doesn’t mean you should

Zoey · August 9, 2016 · 3 Comments

On the weekend I ran one of my toughest runs to date. It was just hard. Hard to get my head into it. And if you can’t get your head into it – that’s a pretty rough place to be for five and a half hours. I thought about quitting more times than I could account for.

The views were pretty great, and the volunteers were amazing.

I think the toughest part of the whole thing was that although I had a bit of an upset stomach from a combination of fuelling and my poor nutritional choices in the week leading up to the marathon – physically I was in great shape. In terms of any muscle niggles definitely the best marathon I’ve done all year. I had no ITB issues and I still had plenty in the tank at the back end of the race, which is a pretty amazing thing when you are running 42 kilometres. And yet still, I just couldn’t get into it. I never hit my stride with it.

The laps and the loops on the course didn’t help my cause any, but they weren’t the reason. And when you have a shocker of a run, I think it’s great to really look at what happened so you can learn from it. And I know what happened.

I signed up for a whole heap of marathons at the end of last year when I was considerably faster than what I am now. I’ve had some work to do this year in terms of recovering from last year – there was probably a bit of over-training involved – and so I’ve needed to take a relaxed approach to my running this year which I’ve really enjoyed as a recuperation of my body. Sure, sometimes I look at Timehop and see how fast I was a year ago and it can be frustrating, but mostly as a lifetime runner I know there will be many ups and downs and my actual pace doesn’t really mean anything. The problem with a marathon is that a relatively small difference in pace results in an extra hour of running. Personally, I find the difference between being out there for four and a bit hours is hugely different to being out there for five and a bit hours. You need to fuel more aggressively for that, which means you have more potential stomach issues to deal with as well.

At South West Rocks, as I was about to turn around on the out-and-back course, I had a thought: I could actually train for half marathons which would require little to no fuelling, not have to fight my body breaking down at around 32km and run without pushing my body to the extreme.

I really enjoyed the Gold Coast Marathon, but still the thought remained, sitting there.

And so at the Brisbane Marathon mentally I’d already decided that I was going to be making a big change to my training and I was completely checked out. Turns out you can’t run a marathon like that.

The benefit of having run seven marathons now is that regardless of training, I always know I can. You just have that knowledge that you can get through anything, having done it before.

Some are fast

Some are slow

But the tough ones will teach you something. And this one taught me that if you don’t listen to your inner voice, you could risk something far worse than quitting in the middle of a marathon. The absolute worst case scenario is not a DNF (Did Not Finish) or even a DNS (Did Not Start) it’s losing my joy for running in the first place. My inner voice is telling me right now that my joy isn’t in the marathon. It’s not the pinnacle. It’s just one distance.

So I will have one last victory lap in Sydney (plenty of joy to be found in running with two of my favourite OpMove Sisters, no matter the distance!) and then me and the marathon will part ways for a long while.

The best decision I will ever make is to nurture my relationship with running. It’s a living, breathing thing. It needs to be listened to and respected and nurtured. That’s the only way we can take care of each other.

When you have a bit of a crap week

Zoey · August 8, 2016 · Leave a Comment

lose ourselves

I wrote this after a week that was particularly crappy and it got me thinking about how to deal with those weeks. Because they can really throw you off centre.

The pesky thing about crappy weeks is there’s usually not a whole lot to point to that makes them crappy. Sure you could point to one thing like the mortgage broker giving you the run around because self-employed money isn’t the same as working-for-the-man money. Self employed money is more like monopoly money, really. Which is ironic because I could definitely buy a house in monopoly. In the scheme of things it’s not that bad, but it knocks you around way more than it has any right to. Or it could be the marathon taper getting to you, but it all just seems a whole lot bigger than the sum of its parts.

First step. Let yourself feel crappy.

I know this feels counter-intuitive. I’m sure if I just list all the ways I’m grateful for how blessed I am, I will feel heaps better. On that note: why do only women do the grateful thing? I feel like it’s a throwback to subservience, but I digress. Feel crappy. It’s ok, you won’t feel like this forever, but right now it’s your feeling and you need to feel it. You might feel particularly crappy realising that you still need to feed the children every night. Every night does seem a bit like overkill. Or because you are tapering you might look outside where you could be running or look fondly at your weights and feel crappy about doing nothing.

Second step. Ride it out and cling to your routine.

Look I understand the temptation is to form an even more permanent bond with your doona, but routine is your friend. Admittedly I was a bit lacking on routine because there was very little activity on my schedule last week, but I was so tempted to just skip the two runs that I did have, but I dragged myself out of bed. Runs felt awful mostly but being outside was nice. Keep doing everything that I normally do because I’m going to feel crappy either way, I might as well be productive as well as crappy.

Third step. Make garlic bread.

OK. Garlic bread might not be your thing. But my ultimate comfort food is potato soup and garlic bread. I made a batch of soup with cauliflower in it because I’m literally at the point of hiding extra vegetables in the hope that they might ingest some identifiable nutrients (one of them did). And then I got a loaf of sourdough and made up garlic butter with fancy butter. It’s hard to feel crappy when you are eating soup and garlic bread with fancy butter. Incidentally, carbohydrates and in particular potatoes are great stress relievers. So two birds, one stone there. I’m relatively certain fancy butter is also a stress reliever.

Fourth step. Make sure there’s leftovers.

I do this by putting enough garlic in the garlic butter that no other human excepting myself will eat it. Then I have comfort lunch sorted for the next day too.

Fifth step. Go do your thing.

Your thing might not be running. It might be something else. But you have something that will remind you who you are. You could feel lost, you could feel found. They could be the same thing. But usually it’s enough to remind you that nothing lasts forever, not even a crappy week.

You deserve to take up space

Zoey · June 10, 2016 ·

I always thought of myself as a wallpaper woman. I had the ability to disappear into the walls, well enough that no one would ever see me there. It starts off as a self-protection measure, and it slowly gets into every crack of your being and every moment of your existence. The irony is of course when I was at my biggest (in terms of weight), I was at my most desperate to be invisible.

On the days that I would go to the 24 hour gym and no one else was there, it was like Christmas to me. And when there were people there, well if you don’t make eye contact it could be almost as though you are invisible. Outside it was the same, if you just keep your head down, it’s almost like you aren’t there.

But you are.

And eventually it works its way into other things as well, like how much your life is structured around making sure you don’t inconvenience anyone else. Almost as though if you contain yourself enough your existence never impinges on anyone else’s.

If you get small enough, it’s almost like you don’t even exist.

But you do.

And I think that’s what learning to run has taught me slowly, and over and over again.

I deserve to take up space.

Outside.

In the gym.

Everywhere.

In my own life.

And you do too.

You have one life, don’t waste it being a wallpaper woman.