A strange bit of news...

Just over a year ago, my house in Versailles was broken into and vandalized, and about $4,500 in material goods were stolen out of the home. It was rough because that house has been nothing but a constant reminder of a year of my life I'd rather have done differently (save for the few good friends I made out of that disastrous job decision). 

So last year at this time, I was sitting in my little farmhouse miles away from the Versailles house hyperventilating over the outrageous cost of homeowner's insurance following the break-in ($500 for three months). I was literally shedding tears over my grandfather's stolen tools; I was kicking myself for being such a poor steward of something that meant so much to me. I was not sleeping well as periodically panic attacks would hit me over whether or not someone was going back to the house to do more of the same. 

The guys who broke into the house were both caught, and we have gotten all but $130 of the restitution from the kid who was ordered to pay $500. We got a letter in mid-November saying that the kid who was charged as an adult was ordered to pay $4200.  But we hadn't seen any of that money. So I called the probation folks today to ask what was going on, and I spoke to a very nice woman with a very thick accent. She asked me for his name. His indictment number. Then there was a pause.

"He passed away."

"I'm sorry. Do you mean he died?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You're serious."

"Yes, ma'am."

What a strange bit of news.

I called a friend from Versailles and told her the news, and she asked me how he died. When had he died? It hadn't occurred to me to ask.

So I went online, and I looked it up. December 3rd--one month after his sentencing in my case. He was driving. And drinking. And he lost control of his car and hit a tree. They had to use the jaws of life to pry both him and his passenger from the vehicle. They airlifted them to the hospital. They both died. 

I read through the comments people made on his funeral page--everyone said he was very well-raised. He was very respectful. He was very caring about other people. People wrote about how well-mannered he was. He had a two-year-old daughter. And apparently, some girl named Lizzie was falling in love with him and wanted to declare her love publicly at his death. 

It presented a stark contrast to what I knew of him. I knew what he did to my house (spray-painted penises all over the walls and refrigerator, burned the carpets, stole my furniture and personal belongings). I also knew that when he was supposed to be appearing in court for his case in regards to my house, he couldn't make it because he was in another jail for having stolen dog food from a store. And he died a violent, drunken death (and took with him one of his friends) on a road where I used to regularly ride my bike.  

I'm trying to reconcile the whole thing in my head. We still have this house for sale, so I can't say that this brings any sort of closure. We are clearly out all the money that we lost, and we can't recuperate it as a tax deduction--he didn't do quite enough damage for us to be able to claim it as a loss. I'll never get to find out where my grandfather's tools ended up (I was planning to speak to his probation officer today to ask him if he might be able to ask about them). I don't feel as if he ever actually had to make amends for all the damages he did. 

And it's sad that his family lost him.

But I have to say that I also had this reaction of, "Well, that's karma." And I don't mean that in an off-the-cuff kind of a way. I mean it in a sincere, when-you-do-too-many-bad-things-the-world-will-spit-back kind of a way. It's hard for me to comprehend that a 20-year old could have done so much badly in such a short life span. But I only knew of him for a year of his life, and I didn't even know all that much of him. But I know that he managed to cause a lot of damage to a person he didn't even know. 

I don't know how to end this writing. So I'll just end it here.

Day 18--January 18--Nirvana

Everything came together today. I wanted to do a long run, and after the weather of the last three or four days, anything about thirty degrees outside was a gift. So when I woke up to overcast skies, a slight wind, and temperatures in the 30s, I thought it might be a perfect day for a run. I set out to do what has now become the loop--a 7.67 mile run from our house and, as the name implies, back to our house in a circular route. I haven't run this distance since early December. In fact, the closest I've come to it was last weekend when I ran four. (Was that last week?) So I wasn't planning to break any speed records. Just wanted to cover the distance. 

I play a lot of mental games on long runs. One, when I know I'm not in shape to cover the whole distance running is to plan out when my walk breaks will happen. For the first three miles, it was run a mile, walk a minute, then finish out the mile in which I had walked. Repeat. At four miles, the mental game switched over to being musical. Run through two songs, walk for a minute, then run through two songs. For a while, I was walking the first minute of a 10 minute block. Then running four. Then walking one, then running four. That didn't last long, but I kind of liked that one. I also did the mental game of walking the first minute of a song, then running through to the end of the song. And I ended the run by counting telephone poles--run three poles, then walk to the next one. That was the last half mile or so. My legs were done at 6.6 miles, so I had to tough it out for the last mile. 

But it felt awesome. I was running through all kinds of agendas in my head. Teaching: Figuring out what to do with the kids this week in reading as we are starting our new program. Figuring out what to do with the kids while I'm away in Phoenix. Running: To run the marathon or not? How did I ever not like running? Baby: Heading to Nashville tomorrow. Wonder what will happen next. I bet if I sign up for a marathon, we'll get pregnant. All that and more. Oh, and I composed a message to the person who beaned me in the head with the soda can back in August. In my mind. I guess I'm still angry. 

When I got home, I crashed on my front lawn. Just laid myself out on the grass right by the road and cooled off. Thought about how much I love running when it goes like this. How much I love living here in this house, on this route. How much I love my husband and this life we are building together. Just one of those feel-good run days, which, after the last few days of just toughing it out, I really needed. 

January 13--Day 13

The weather has become bitterly cold here. Okay, not bitterly cold. But everyone always says "cold" and "bitterly" together, so I thought I might as well join the crew. I'd say it's more like just cold. So the key to keeping up running when it is cold is to not ever stop. From the moment I get out of my truck coming home from school to walking in the door to putting on running clothes to heading back out again to run... don't stop. You probably thought I meant something about not stopping while on a run. Nope. Once you're running, that's the easy part. It's getting out to run that's hard. So don't stop. Get dressed. Go. Don't think twice.

Why?

Because if you think twice about it, your mind starts to take over and it starts thinking that going from a perfectly warm place to a perfectly cold place is just perfectly stupid. It starts thinking things like, "I can run later. No big deal." It starts rationalizing. And running in cold weather isn't remotely rational. It just isn't. 

So on day 13, I went into auto pilot. Went for a run (longer than my normal during the week runs), and had only muscle spasms in my back put a stop to the insanity. But I have thirteen days under my belt and 18 to go. 

Day 9--A running streak

Turns out I'm not eligible for membership in the United States Running Streak Association until after a full year of being on a streak. Well, at least not eligible to be listed on their website as having held a streak for more than a year. This inspired me to consider extending my streak. But then I thought, "Well, you almost didn't make it past day 7." So I'm thinking I might be better off just sticking with the "31 runs in 31 days" goal for now and then re-evaluating at the end of the month. This would give me a natural place to end (or to begin a new streak). 

It continues. Day 9. 

Day 8--it's been a rough week

time: 11:15

distance: 1.1 miles

It's been a rough week. My aide was out of class today, and I'm wiped. The kids were great, but it doesn't matter... no matter how great they are, it's tough to stay patient all day long when there's no one else there to help sort and filter through the kids' 1000 questions. 

So runs have been rough, as well. Short. And I've been whiny. But I've been doing them. Last night I came close to staying home, but I committed to 31 days of running. And last night was... well, I had a headlamp on and was running up our road in the cold of the night thinking, "Fuck. I hate this." But there's also something to be said about doing something no matter what. No matter what. 

Day 5--cold running

Distance: 1.5 miles

Time: 15:12

I certainly didn't want to go out today. It was cold (upper 20s/low 30s), drizzly wet, and windy. And I knew I wasn't going to be out for long. And I knew that it wasn't going to be all that much fun. But I made a commitment, and I went. Out. 

I actually tried to go hard for part of the run--thinking that even though I wasn't going to run long, I'd maybe benefit from going faster. I don't really have a faster, honestly. But I gave it a whirl. I'd like to be faster, theoretically. And every time I take a break from running, I somehow think that I'm going to be able to just be faster when I come back. I mean, my husband can run an 8-minute mile without blinking. Why not me? Well, not me. 

But I ran today. Day 5. Gotta keep running. 

Day 4

Distance: 4.00 miles (on day 4...how appropriate!)

Time: 42:13

Cumulative distance: 10.8 miles. (HEY, that's not bad!)

It's amazing to me how I can be all revved up and ready to go on a run, step out the door, and one little hitch will make me change my whole plan. Tonight, it didn't. But I admit that as I stood on the front porch of the house in the misting rain waiting for the Garmin to pick up the satellites, I felt the run number in my head changing lower and higher and lower and higher. And as that little black line flirted with getting itself all the way across the screen and then jumped back, then forward, then back... I felt my brain clicking through the "How far do I really want to go today?" thought process.

I had it in my head that I was going to do 4. That changed to three. Then even down to one when my feet hit the road. But as I started to put one foot in front of the other, to feel the chill of the misty rain hitting me in the face, and to listen to Garrison Keillor telling the Tales from Lake Wobegon on my MP3 player, I found myself just getting into the rhythm of the run and going. 

At the 2 mile turnaround, I was debating taking a walk break. There also almost always comes a point in a run where I have to decide how hard I want this to feel. Pretty tough today. I was running the whole thing. And I did. I finished relatively comfortably. Again, not as fast as I thought I would be... but having covered the entire distance running, I was content. Now, it's back to school tomorrow. 

Humble Pie

Tomorrow is the first day back at school post-Christmas break. I'm running later today--whenever Kevin gets back from the farm. But for right now, I'm sitting on my bed in our bedroom with a pile of about ten pairs of jeans, eight or nine shirts, and various other pieces of clothing I've weeded out from my closet. It's humbling. At one time, I fit into all these articles of clothing. I didn't realize how far away from fitting into all these pieces of clothing I had gotten until I tried them on this morning.

I hold onto clothes. I think I'm always right around the corner from losing the weight that it will take to put these clothes back on. But when I went through these clothes this morning, I realized that even if I were to lose the weight to get these clothing items back on, I probably wouldn't want to wear them anyway. I wouldn't buy them if I were in the store with them today. That's my litmus test.

Still, I'm trying not to beat myself up, but it's hard. I want to kick my own ass for getting this out of shape, for putting on weight (like so many people do in their first years after getting married even though I swore to myself up and down that that would not happen to me), and I'm trying not to beat myself up about losing that discipline that I know I once had.

It's hard, at times, for me to not go back to this move to Kentucky as the root cause of this. Yes, a lot of good has come out of the move, and I'm ultimately glad that I did it. But at the same time, it's hard for me to not see a series of decisions that I made when I first got here in reaction to the stressors of that job that I took. I get this really victimy feeling about the whole thing... as if Mary O. (my old boss) was holding the puppet strings. I gave away too much power, and whenever I go back to thinking about it, I'm giving up that power again. But it's a tough row to hoe, I guess. I'm working at it.

So I'm donating all these old jeans and all these shirts that I never wear, and I've traded them out for some beautiful clothes I got in Michigan this last week, and I'm trying to regain some confidence and dig deeper to balance out the parts of my life that I love with the parts of my life that I miss. I can have both of those things at the same time. 

Day 3

Distance: 2.0 miles

Time: 20.04

Running total distance: 6.8 miles

Day 3

We spent a large chunk of the day today in Louisville celebrating my father-in-law's 60th birthday. I didn't have a lot of motivation to run when we got home. The temp was in the 50s and threatening rain. I was stiff from driving for three hours, doing some sitting at my sister-in-law's house, eating poorly while there (we were promised pizza... there was no pizza). But running no matter what is a pretty simple concept. Love it.

So I went down to the Oakland school track and set out to run a mile and a half and ended up running two. Right on. 

Day 2--Night Running

Distance: 1.8 miles

Time: 18 minutes

Ouch level: Not all that high. Feeling a bit of soreness in my right shin and a bit around the knees as I'm requesting that my body carry around more weight than I ought to.

Day 2

My Garmin was beeping at me before I even started today--Low Battery. My Ironman watch has been dead for several months. So the time above is estimated, and the distance is maybe a little generous. I ran tonight without any sense of how far I was going or how long I was going... I checked my cell phone right before I got out of the truck and right when I got back to it, and that's how I got my run time. I estimated the distance based on a 10 minute mile, and that might be a little generous, although I did no walking tonight.

120 days from today is the Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon, and I'm thinking about giving it a whirl. I won't commit until the 31st of January, so we'll see how this month goes. But if I'm going to sign on for a spring marathon, that's the one I'm going to sign on for. 

Day 1

Run: 3.00 miles

Time: 32 minutes

Route: Oakland School Track and back

Weather: 40s, sunny, headwind on the way out, tailwind on the way back

Post-run: wheezing, red-faced, feeling good

Today is day 1 of my 31 day running streak. I set a goal of 31 days to see where it leads me. The only parameter for the streak is that I have to run every day. Shooting for at least a mile for it to count as a run. But really, the focus is on getting out there every day no matter what. 

I'm not sure why.

Sometimes I train for a race. Sometimes I train for fun. Sometimes I train from guilt. The goal of running for the sake of maintaining the streak is something new for me. So I thought I'd try it. 

Day 1

My ass felt huge. I suited up. Told myself not to beat myself up and headed out the door like millions of other Americans who are using today as an excuse to start again. Some people mock that idea. I figure today is as good of a day as any, so why not start today? Should I put it off until tomorrow just to avoid starting on January 1? Silliness.

So I set off to run. And I ran a mile and a half before I took a 40-step walk break. Then another half mile before a 35 step walk break. Then another half mile before a 40 stepper. Then the rest of the way home. It didn't feel bad. I am working hard to tell myself positive things. Not to dwell on where I once was or where I feel I ought to be, but to run where I am right now. And see where that will take me. 

Post-run, I'm feeling wheezy and red-faced but strong. It's the start of something new. And something new is always exciting for me.