35 minutes later... I am still a runner.

Sunday I managed to ride my bike a whopping 35 minutes with the British Gentleman. That's not miles.... MINUTES...

This coordinates with the 35 minute Run I pulled off on Saturday...  I even did a few strides...

Do you realize that in February I rode my MTB for 22 miles over several hours? And Yep, I was BEAT after that adventure, but DAMN, I rocked the sh*t out of it. The part of me that was tired was my legs. My lungs and heart coulda kept going for days. It's an endurance thing. I hear it a lot from endurance athletes. We train our lungs and hearts to just keep going. (That's what she said).

And all through February I spent Wednesday morning's running my weekly 16 mile long run...

yeah, it's rainy and there are wet roads, but I did
 have a yen to go for a ride on Easter.

I'm not her anymore. That girl who was consistently running 14, 15, 16 miles on any given day, and then tooling around the James River Park system on her mountain bike with a few crazy guys & our Fearless Fear-dra, well... she doesn't really exist anymore.

That's what I need to forget, remember, hang onto, and let go of...

The person who lives in her body now has no lung capacity, no endurance, and not only that, the lungs she has are finicky. They don't like cold, heat, wet, dry, etc etc etc. And if they get tired, they hurt. There's pain that sneaks in on the right side and slides through the bronchioles like an icy wet sponge... that will make sense to some people, I swear...

The new girl needs to
FORGET trying to compare herself to the athlete.
REMEMBER that the athlete didn't become an athlete over night, and patience is required.
HANG ONTO the feeling of getting high off a 2.95 mile run for the days that are hard.
LET GO of your fear... Yoda says fear is the path to the dark side.

The fear that I'll never get "there" again, that it was a one time thing, that I can't, or won't... it is LAUGHABLE. 

and at the same time, it's there. It NAGS. It FESTERS. It GROWS.

I'm a four time marathoner, and Half Ironman finisher. Why in the world would I believe I can't get there from here? It's like I just need to remember how the story goes. I need to remember that the path wasn't lined with Personal Bests, it was lined with hard work and sweat. And Hard work.

Once upon a time, on a Tuesday, I went out and ran...

...a 5K out and back. ..But I wasn't stopping.  No way.  I had my 20 (thousand) pound stroller making me look cool...and an amazing thing happened. I realized that I was one of the runners at the 5K....  My run is place to lay my worries, with the knowledge that if I want, I can choose to heat them and gently tap them into the shapes of acceptance. ... and I was rewarded for my patience. “How you doing?” “Galactically BadA**”....  I was cruising down a hill and spray painted on the road were the letters GBA. I honestly looked around for people I knew....and then I paused for a minute as a random thought hit me, "Except, honestly, I hate 5K's enough to not want to do one right now. They hurt so much more than marathons."... and on some level they become impossible to separate.  Sometimes that pain comes to me in the form of fear.  It burns as it's torching me from the inside.  Other times it’s physical pain that I can articulate on a moan as aching muscles beg for attention. ... I did a 72.3 mile race this weekend.  Not a typo... 

So there you go....

even though I am not doing a whole lot of running these days... I am still a runner.

And runners are weird.

~savor~