run this amazing day

If I could draw a circle around me with chalk, I said to the poet the other day, I would draw the tiniest circle that I could, and you would still be inside of it. And then Graham would shove his butt between us , he replied. The week leading up to ironman is a quiet time for me, I've discovered.  It's not a time to be bursting with energy and socializing and tweeting a million pictures of the M-dot logo.  It's definitely not a time to be using the words crush  or smash  or destroy .  That isn't what ironman is about, not for me.  So, for maybe the only time in my life, I pipe down.  I spent the week leading up to Lake Placid talking quietly with my husband, having deep and peaceful conversations with good friends, reading alone, or sometimes just sitting quietly with my thoughts.  I leave the iPod packed away, I let the TV shows wait, I stay off of twitter except for the occasional hit-and-run post, I give the volume button on my surroundings a good hard twist to

Since I am getting closer to ironman time, it  means some workouts with the words "test" or "TT" are showing up on my schedule.  Now, I love training.  I really do, I'd almost rather just train and train than race, races are scary gahhhhh, but training, I love it.  It drips happy juice into my life.  But testing or time trialing or whatever you want to call it, it brings up a feeling in me that I only recently began to pinpoint as dread.  Dread and fear. Now, why, when I love to train so much, why do I dread these sessions?  Send me out for a long run and tell me to run 60 minutes at MAF and I'm happy as a clam, but send me to the track for a six mile MAF test and I'll do my warm-up and then dither and dally and scuff my feet and poke around and retie my shoes and look around for someone who is going to kick me off for being on the track during school hours until I finally have to say out loud, Just go already, sheesh and then it STILL takes me anothe

Over the summer, I went down to Albuquerque to visit with one of my closest friends.  While I was there, she got a new tattoo, to remind her of being in the moment. She told me that her husband would tell her this when she was rushing around, trying to figure out what to do with the next day or the next.  I was ready to get a tattoo of my own, but was spooked by the "five days to possibly four weeks" of time that I would have to spend out of the pool while it healed (see you in a few weeks, tattoo lady).  But this thought has stayed with me, inked in my brain instead of on my body (although until I just looked up that picture, I remembered it as, "now we are here" so maybe it was just scribbled in pencil up there).  It's a thought I've had rolling around in my head the past few weeks as my life has undergone some more change and growth - which can sometimes be uncomfortable.  But this thought is similarly uncomfortable - not only as a reminder to stay gro

I've been working on a post called "where the hell have I been and what I've been up to," but then I raced a 5K last weekend so I get to write a race report and the rest of it can just....well...wait, a while longer. The poet and I flew back to the east coast as part of a surprise 60th birthday party extravaganza for my dad.  Days before I left, Twitter alerted me that Anabel was going to be in town and Yasi was around.  After a flurry of emails and texts, we decided to race a 5K together.  "Together" being a fairly loose term, but we'd all start at the same time and end up at the brunch table at the same time, which is all that really matters. I do not like racing 5Ks.  I used to claim that the 10K was my least favorite distance - it's hurts as bad as a 5K but for twice as long! -  but that's never really been true, the 5K takes the crown in my book.  I'd much rather race for hours on top of hours, it spreads out the pain in such a way

What does triumph look like at mile 19 of a marathon? I had been so happy out of the gate, running the first few miles by heart rate. Running without any music. In fresh shoes and new shorts that I knew would not chafe. Finally, at this race I had wanted to run since seeing Spirit Of The Marathon, standing on the start line while they blared Sweet Home, Chicago. But, by mile 19 the bad voices had started and all they wanted was for me to stop for just a few seconds, to walk the water stops, to cease whatever I was doing. And normally, my strategies would be to turn the music up (but I had no music) or tell them to STFU (shut up!). But I had been reading Eat and Run and several Pema Chodron books. What Chodron and Scott Jurek have in common is their belief in staying here, in this moment, as you are, embracing it. The other logic being that the struggle, the fight, the argument with yourself takes heart rate and energy which you should be channeling into the run. And so, this ti