After a languid morning of watching episodes from the last season of Sex in the City and eating berries and light whipped cream (no, I wasn't wearing a pink fuzzy robe but I might as well have been), I found that my PMS brain was running over its usual worry: "there's not enough time." There are many versions of this. Today's was alternating between worrying that my whole summer will go by without me doing anything more than watching a mindless TV series (and that maybe some of those characters will rub off on me and I'll start whining about my vain non-problems to anyone who'll listen and nitpicking my boyfriend) and beating myself up about the fact that I haven't dealt with the laundry I promised to deal with two days ago. The weather was starting to look cloudy and breezy. I opened a new window on Firefox to watch another episode, and then some merciful instinct urged me to hit pause, run upstairs to throw on a sportsbra, wrench the house key off its ring, and go for a two-mile run. I thought about taking my Zen with me to listen to NPR, but then I remembered I hadn't uploaded the latest shows yet. Sometimes laziness is the thing that actually gets me out the door.
Alone with my breathing and my achy lower leg bones, it didn't take my mind long before it started jumping ahead to dangle a carrot: if you can make it without walking, you can say you've run two miles without stopping. Then I'd go back to not-thinking and feeling the rhythm of my feet and breathing, then I'd jump ahead to imagining posting on Facebook, calling Leif, calling my mom and saying "I ran two miles without stopping once! For the first time!"
I'm in love (or should I say my ego is in love) with the idea of having done something. I just want to be done. Skip the burning legs, side cramps, sweat, and discomfort and cut to the big finish. The idea that there will be a race in six weeks is freaking my ego out (It wants to NOT be the caboose. It wants to accomplish the goal I imagined and, therefore, not fail.). After those thoughts comes the inevitable I can't do it. Fuck it. That's enough. Why did I bother in the first place? Followed by disappointment. I want that magic breakthrough--I want to know that at exactly week 4 day 2 (or at whatever point), something will kick in and everything will start to get easier. Because I don't think I can keep going through the same discomfort again and again, which is of course false. I've been doing it for three weeks and I come out alive every time. But I'm throwing a big story on top of what's actually happening.
This is why I haven't run very far before. It's so uncomfortable that it causes me to really come up hard against what I think about myself. This is why I know that it's worth experimenting with and it's worth coming back to again and again.
I ended up running 1.5 miles without stopping (I figured it out on Google maps) and feeling very disgruntled that I couldn't just stick it out for .5 more. During those 1.5 miles, I noticed that running can, in fact, obliterate thinking, which makes it 1) not boring and 2) a therapeutic tool. I noticed that at the point when I think my legs and lungs will give out, they don't--they just keep being uncomfortable. I noticed that it feels better, while running, to say: "I'm on Belmont. I'm on Arlington" than "I'm almost to Belmont. I'm almost to Arlington." You can't sustain a run without being in the moment--it's as if there isn't room for both the intense experience your body is trying to cope with and the thoughts about how hard it is and how you want it to stop and when can I lay down in the AC? You have to pick one or the other.
I know I'm not where I wanted to be at this point. I also know that this thought doesn't offer any insight into where I actually am.
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