Another Freaking bestdayEVER

Everything is easier when you are happy.

Whether it's losing weight, pushing through the hard 20 miles on the back of a 50 mile bike ride, running further than you've run in this training cycle... Everything is easier when you're happy.

It is easier to forgive myself for yesterday's mistakes, or embracing tomorrow's adventures... both are lightened by the lightness I feel in my heart.

Yes, sad things happen, and in those moments it's odd... I guess I still feel happy at my core. Even when tears are falling, there isn't a hopelessness blanketed over me.

What I've learned this week... month... the last 12 months... is that when I am happy with myself I am able to forgive myself. I am able to capture today as the most important day, to live with joy, to savor the run...

I'm able to respect the distance and appreciate how FREAKING FAR I've come.

I remember what it means to live with the FISH philosophy.  I remember that it's easy to make someone else's day when you wake up and feel that your day is made. It's a pleasant experience to look around and think, if today was "it" and I never had anything else, I could be happy with "this".

There are no "if only" regrets clogging my heart today because today is the bestdayever.

And that probably makes me a really f*cking irritating companion to hang with...

But that's Okay too.

~ respect the distance ~

Speed Work:Work Day

Training and being a nurse requires creativity. I’m coming to appreciate that more and more. This week though, I’m worried I may have crossed a threshold between Creativity and CraZy.

At least once a week I get up at 0425 to go catch a run down town. I run with a pack of badass mother (runn)ers who charge through the city like they’re being  chased by a bear.

But really they’re just being chased by me, because I am dead ass last.  Which is really a little cruel because I was running a 7something the other day and still f’ing dead ass last.

That said, I’m getting faster and part of that I attribute to my creativity in training.

~hypoxia – the birthplace of innovation and creativity ~

Y’all know that I started using the stairs exclusively in December of last year in an effort to strengthen my glutes? Well, some of my coworkers are also embracing the stairs...  only my “one to two flights a day” and sometimes “a random timed sprint” wasn’t enough for them. They started skipping lunches, or taking about 3 minutes every hour (it’s literally three minutes total) to walk down to Ground level and do lunges up to level 6.

Over this weekend we went up another level, and found that we were huffing about 4 - 6 flights in the course of a day.  It’s reasonably easy to leave your patients in the care of another nurse for 3 minutes so you can hit the stairs at the top of the hour, and my coworkers are a bunch of  badasses who think that’s a genius idea.

Add those stairs to the 5-7 miles of walking during our regular job, and you quickly realize that these intervals are becoming a legit workout.

So let me clarify that the bada**es I work with are FREAKING galactic.

And late in this week... “the ante” was severely “upped”.

One of my corworkers in particular, The Gazelle, took the pride I expressed in my badass time of 57.3 seconds for 12 flights of stairs as a challenge. She is literally one of the most graceful people I've met. 

Me next to her is like...

Me.

My Co-Workers on the stairs

well. 

basically...

imagine a footrace between a Gazelle versus Barney Rubble?

That's us.

“Gauntlet Down”, she said.

And so, the 6 foot tall beauty I work with set about kicking my a**.

And she did. She beat my personal best by 4 seconds.

FOUR.

I did not imagine shaving off four seconds, but because I am an idiot who can be baited into almost anything athletic, especially by a younger hotter woman, I went ahead and asked her to sprint with me.  I knew I could not beat her, but I hoped like hell that if I used her for a rabbit I would run faster.

And I imagined that if she had me chasing her, she would run faster too.

So... at the beginning of our lunch break we walked down to the ground floor and waited until we heard no one else on the stairs.

It was quiet. We were giggling a little at our ridiculousness. Because let’s be clear. This was level 10 ridiculousness.

And it was epic.

On your mark... that was the longest 12 flights of stairs in my life... I wanted to die. When I got to the top my legs were shaking and I leaned against a wall. And then sat on the stairs. And saw spots...

We made some CODE BLUE jokes.

And I chuckled because I have never felt closer to having a Code called on me than I did in that moment... or I would have chuckled, but I couldn’t breath. Or move. Or think.

But aside from all that, it was wicked fun. ~craZy~

I did not take off 4 seconds. I took off 7.3 seconds. 

Of course, what happened next is exactly what you’re all imagining. I was still gasping (with pleasure?) from an intense 50 seconds when I rounded on my patients... And a family member wanted a complete explanation of Acute Kidney Failure... or something like that...  

uh

“Well...(gasp).... the physiology (breathe Ginny breathe) of the Kidney (*air*) is built around (omg) the idea ...” and so on and so forth. Eventually my heart rate normalized and I wasn’t shaking anymore and I was able to give him a solid answer.

And he didn’t seem bothered at all that his family member’s nurse was a bit, shall we say, breathy?

For the record let me be clear – my companions smoked me and ran it in :42...

And you know what I’m thinking?  I’m thinking that my work day speed work is a legit.  Yes, it’s 4 minutes of intense cardio in 13 hours, but it’s a well needed mental break, a blast of endorphins, and if nothing else, my HR is elevated for 10 minutes an hour for 4 hours a day.

50 seconds is going to be hard to beat. I will have to work hard to get a new PR.  And I WILL work hard to get a new PR, even though I know that when I’m racing the Gazelle I will STILL be dead ass last.

~savor the run~

WINE and CHOCOLATE and RUN. oh my

The Flowers my Run
got me for V'day

Yesterday I spent the morning with my Valentine. As I said before, my Run and I are in a deeply committed relationship. 

Its "The Year of the 5K", and I have made it a priority to get my speed back in 2015.  So in order to do that, I have to make goals.

The Long Term Goal – beat 23:25 22:59

Saturday’s Goals in no particular order:

Win.

Run Sub 8-minute miles.

Try Not To Suck.

Pretty simple, eh?

And beyond these things, anything else was just icing on the cake. And to be clear, there wasn’t cake, but the 5K was at New Kent Winery, so it didn’t matter.  There was WINE and CHOCOLATE and RUN.

Almost all of my favorite things together in one place.  ~pinch me~ 

So let me just start by saying what had’a happen’d wuz the weather was bitterly cold. But I thought it was just on the edge of my “skirt” vs “tights” line.  So I decided to wear a skirt for racing and change after. 

Maybe shoulda rethought that one, but s’ok. I survived. And the feeling slowly returned to my legs after a hot shower that drained the hot water heater...

Dash, Dot and I arrived to the race nice and early, parked, and headed up to the porta potty line, all the way commenting on how beautiful it is out there at New Kent Winery.

100% beautiful. And 100% cold. Freakishly cold. Way colder than I like. Way way colder than my lungs tolerate.  Back to that in a minute...

We checked our bags, ran about a mile warm up with a few strides thrown in, and since the race was scheduled to start at 9, I lined up on the start line at about 8:55.

An echo floated on the wind, "If you toe the line, you have to race."

 ~ Coach HP ~

And there I waited in the freezing cold. Standing still. Did I mention the cold? No? Ok. It was chilly.

That wasn’t a big deal though.  'Cos it was only for 5 minutes. Except that 15 minutes later I realized it was going to be a problem. 'Cos we were still waiting and my body was locking up. My lips could barely move. I was bouncing in place trying to keep warm but nothing was working.

My lungs questioned our sanity. I told them to STFU, my Run and I were on a date, Lungs would have to sit tight.

The race started at closer to 9:15, so I’d been standing still for 20 minutes in freezing temps with a wind chill of well below freezing. Wearing a skirt, ‘cos I’m legitimately stupid a Galactic Badass.

It was only a 5K though, and I knew it would be over soon.  

As usual, I didn’t wear a watch. Why bother? My race day strategy for the 5K distance is “Run on the edge of death, and when you want to die, push yourself just a little harder”.

I don’t know what my pace was at any given point, but at mile 1ish (the course was unmarked) I was running side by side with the 2^nd place female. At the turn into the golf course I dropped her and set my sights on the 1^st place female and she dropped me like one of Those People I Don’t Know on a Tuesday Morning.

I couldn’t catch her, so I entertained myself by chasing down the next available Male I spotted. I repeated my mantra in my head, "How bad do you want it?" as my body started to fatigue.

I finished on the uphill without looking too deeply at the clock.  I walked a few hundred yards past the smattering of volunteers with shaking legs while fighting to draw air in through my quickly narrowing wind pipe.

After I grabbed my checked bag and threw on all the clothing I’d brought, I headed back to the finish line just in time to see Dot then Dash cross the line. I grinned at Dash, “I hope you don’t mind if we hang out for a while... cos I’d like to stay for the awards ceremony...”.  I sounded like Hell; OH yeah, and at the wine tasting after the race, we ran into my Jr High boyfriend.  As in, the boy I "went out with" in 1990ish.

True. Freaking. Story.  

What are the odds? Well, apparently, when I'm involved, the odds are good that the world will continue grow smaller and smaller.

Back to the running. My personal best is still a minute out of range, but I’m making progress.

24:31 earned me Female Open Second Place.

7:53 avg. pace

I did not suck.

I failed at my goal of winning.

This is what failure looks like, if you want to know.

Failure looks like taking :45 seconds off my 5K time in two months.

Failure

Failure looks like an open bottle of wine at 10 a.m., a few beautiful roses, and many smiles. Failure can further be defined by the copious amounts of laughter and badassery that was exchanged across the span of a white tablecloth.  And by the frozen “My Banana is Hard” jokes. And by the hours that passed in the company of new friends as we grew increasingly breathless with laughter from the hilarity that ensued.

No one could have predicted that a 5K in New Kent would result in Jesus on a Log stories, the discovery of a really charming vineyard, and a deeper appreciation of why it’s important for women to surround themselves with a good support system.

our new friends - seriously, these
women define Galactic BadA**ery
without even trying.

I ended my day by having two pretty severe asthma flare-ups. I leaned on my support system for one, and relied on my own knowledge for the other. It will likely change my run strategy this week, but I’m hopeful that this was an acute event, not the beginning of anything else. 

This will be a “recovery”/”baby myself” week, but I'll be out there chasing the Back To Last crew as soon as my lungs allow.

Finally -

To the Race Director of the Vinterra Race for the Chocolate there's only a few things I would change about your race. The Race Tent needed heaters inside or a Fire Pit outside. There was no place to wait before the race that was warm.  The race should have started on time, or the runners should have been advised that it was 15 minutes behind schedule.  The course was great, exactly as advertised. I will definitely run this one next year.

The Year of The 5K : The Updated Stat Sheet.

For Good Measure

I have swagger.

I do. I have for a while now. 

Recently, as I was looking at an ancient photo of 8 year old me, I saw myself in her eyes and thought, “I’ve finally grown into the woman that girl was meant to be.” She was brimming with swagger.

I don’t want to get into the details about where my swagger went, but for most of my adult life my swagger has been muted. It was there though, stuck to me, like a piece of lint on a wool coat.

Too small to use, too insignificant to get rid of, it sat there unnoticed until I took up running.

That’s when I started feeding it.

And little by little it grew into something worthwhile. I nurtured my swagger, I listened to it as it started talking back to the negative inner voice that haunts so many of us. Eventually my swagger started forming opinions on many things; it weighed in on my life choices.

It kicked the negative inner voice in the face a couple of times for good measure.

This week I realized that my swagger was my vulnerability.
This week I realized that my swagger is my vulnerability.

I embraced it, accepted it, and nurtured it, and because of that, I was able to achieve more. My swagger is the sword I used to beat back shame.

It is shame that told me I was a failure; it is shame that told me I should be afraid. 

Every day that I go out to run with Those People I Don't Know, I fail. I fail to keep up.  I fail to run as fast as they run. In short, I am a failure.

If keeping up is the measure of success, then I am a failure.

But what if LIFE is the measure of success?

In failing, I am living. In my failure I find laughter, I find strength, and I find the courage to go out and fail again.

I would rather epically fail trying to improve myself, than to sit on the sidelines waving a flag of mediocrity and watch as life passes. Certainly if I quit running with Those People I Don't Know, I won't fail anymore, but at least as a failure, I am in the mix.

My swagger's opinion is that the only way to succeed is to fail at something, and still show up tomorrow to run again.

~ savor the run ~   

Dead A** Last

I over-slept this morning.  I was toying with the idea of randomly showing up on the fly to run with my friend SpeeDee.  She’s usually at a particular intersection at 5:20 a.m.  I didn’t give her a heads up though, because I was so tired after my day of work yesterday that I thought, if I wake up and am too sore to run, I’ll stay in bed and run later.  

So yeah.  That was my half-formed half-assed mental plan as I set my alarm and dozed off.

I bolted awake at 4:56 a.m. with a catchy alarm tune singing in my ear, my heart in my throat, and a run on my mind.

I need to run, I said, as I flew out of bed.  I tossed, tugged, pulled and laced, and 7 minutes later I was outside... walking my dogs.

C’mon dogs... c’mon!  I’ve got to...  there’s no way I’m making it to SpeeDee’s run.  Aaaaannnddd I think I knew that when I got dressed in these running clothes, but at least I made the effort.

There’s another run that goes from the same intersection at 0530 and I knew I could still make it.  Oh freaking five thirty.  I’ve never tried to run with them before.  I know they’re fast.  Ed and Harry Potter are frequently among them and there’s a little voice that echo's my old sentiments, “no way am I trying to run with Those People...” 

Except lately I’ve been advised to tell my inner voice to STFU.  That the little inner voice is holding me back from great things.  So I declared to myself, as I buckled my seatbelt and yanked the car into drive, “The Inner Voice of Sense and Reason is to be ignored for the rest of today”. 

Starting at 0505 this morning, I put her on mute.

Maybe not my best idea, but let’s not get off topic.

I drove to the Rogue Run thinking, Why the F*ck not? Right?  May as well go kick my ass this morning, and why worry if I don’t know the route?  Why fret if I don’t know who will be there?  Or that the people I do know will be there are blistering fast runners?  I mean, Hey, what could happen?

I'm GBA gf.  I’ve got this.

I so did not “got this”.

Mile 1 was an 8:45 ish pace....  That was the warm up?  After that, things got interesting.  I worked every single step of the run.  Every. Single. Step.

The group has a system for mixing paces called “back to last”.  The fastest runners occasionally loop all the way back to the end of the pack to “pick up” the last runner.  Then they run off again, and loop back again.

Good stuff.

Great.

Awesome.

Except for the part of the morning that went like this, “Are you last?”

“Yep,” I replied.  “Last.... that’s me.... ”

That was not an awesome feeling.

Mentally, this was a challenging place to find myself.  I’m not that slow, am I?  I mean, as I looked down at the 8:18 on my watch and watched the group pull away from me like I was yogging (I think it's a soft j), I thought, “butbutbutbut... I’m running a freaking 8:18!”

And then I thought -

So, you're running a freaking 8:18?  It seems that to keep up with them this morning you need to be running a freaking 8:00.  Pick it up, G.

Each time the group circled back to last, and lest we forget, I was dead ass last, I would try to push my dead ass last self a little harder.

I barely held it together at points.  It freaking sucked to watch them blow past me and pull away again and again.  I wanted to cut the route short, but I knew that if I kept pushing to hang onto the group that my dear friend LongLegsLeslie (3L) would loop back to me, and WineNOTwhine (WnW) would be near by to encourage me.  I thought, I’ll borrow some energy from Harry Potter as he runs by me next time.  MTT Coach Michael escorted me up a long dark hill, feeding me words of strength as we climbed.

I remember thinking that this was a hard run, maybe the hardest run of my life, because it is mentally difficult to watch the group pull away.  I suppose some people would quit; some would choose to cut the route and go a different way.

That's not where I let my head go.  I wanted to be in the group.  I wanted to go faster, to push harder.  I was hungry for the pain that accompanies running faster than one's comfort zone.  I wanted to run side by side, in the conversation, rubbing elbows with the pack.

Mental toughness today wasn’t about the run. 

It was about hanging on to the hard effort even though my effort would only ensure that I was still dead ass last.  I didn’t really finish dead ass last, exactly.  The last group of “back to last” nestled me into the fold and we all ran in together... at an 8:25.

Brook, another runner I don't know at all, said, "What was the mileage?  My watch must've thought it was a hard run too, 'cos it died."

I looked down and my mouth formed a little "oh".  

While the "back to last" gang must've run further, I still managed to knock out 7.20 miles in 1:03:07.  not bad, not bad at all.

Today at the end of the run I was raw.  My legs felt like ground beef... beef that had been pounded with a mallet... and possibly fed to some carnivore...  I flopped on a chair near some other runners in the brightly lit coffee shop.  The buzz of endorphins was as impossible to miss as the caffeine in my cup.  It felt good to hurt that bad in the company of others.

Despite the pain and misery of the morning, as soon as I got home I looked at my calendar.  I wanted to know when I could have the privilege of being dead ass last again.

~ savor the run ~ respect the distance ~