SUMMER RAMBLINGS

"But it's all right here, right now
In your hands and still out of reach somehow
This endless precipice
Or honey whatever it is
Oh, it just don't get better than this"

'This', OK Go

It's been a minute.  And I wish I had some awesome story or epic adventure to share with you.  But, I don't.  Truthfully?  Mid-summer is always the point in the year when I wonder whether it's worth keeping a blog going.  There's not a lot of racing on the calendar.  I don't have a lot going on with coaching or my girls.  Well, that's not true.  Rosie & Grace are, in fact, quite busy.  Just not with things that involve me.  But you get the point.  Things are relatively quiet.  At the same, this little lull in run/mom/work life during the summer is usually the calm before the fall storm, if you will.  And this year, the "storm" will be totally different as Rosie will be flying out to Colorado for her first year of college.  What??? 

Fun fact, I created this blog back in 2011.  I was just starting to get serious about training and racing.  It was my first year as an assistant XC and track coach over at LHS.  And Rosie and Grace were....wait for it...5 and 7 years old.  I can't even.

Here we are now.  Twelve years later.  I've run 31 marathons.  I'm the head girls XC and track coach over at LHS.  Rosie is 18 and Grace is 16.  Rosie has just graduated from high school and Grace is going to be a junior.  And if I'm being honest, it still hasn't really hit me that she's leaving.  Totally nuts.  All of it.

As far as running goes, the last race I posted about here was Boston which went relatively well all things considered.  It is a pretty crazy story if you're curious.  A few weeks after that, my Whirlaway teammates and I lined up again for the BAA Half.  I have never felt more physically exhausted before a race then for this one.  Like, the morning of, I was seriously wondering if I could even finish it.  And, as you can see, I basically slept my way through it.  Ok, I didn't.  But the photo above does capture exactly how I felt at the moment.  The combination of the end of our spring track season at LHS, the end of Rosie's senior year and the general fatigue I was still feeling from the marathon had me in a virtual puddle.  I had no business racing again.  But, we've all be there, done that.  For the next six or seven weeks I was kind of a hot mess.  My running was garbage.  Every mile felt terrible.  I was tired all the time.  Taking naps at 5:00pm and then getting in bed again at 9:00.  Physically I was hanging by my fingernails and I thought it was because I had too much going on and I couldn't get ahead of it.  Not so.  After multiple different blood tests, I finally learned that I'd been dealing with Mono which I'd probably gotten right around the same time that I raced the half.  Honestly, I was thrilled to finally figure this out as I was starting to think there was something very wrong with me. 

Running through Mono is not the best idea and I don't recommend it but in fairness to me I didn't know I had it.  The net-net here was that running pretty much sucked for all of June and part of July.  But I still managed to slog my way through quite a few miles.  And instead of training and racing I just ran a lot of easy miles with friends from all over the place.  Which I loved.  I met up with my best friend Laurie in CT.

I got a few runs in with my friend Jayne who I reconnected with after having run a marathon together back in 2015.  That was an unexpected surprise.

I even ran a 5k with Grace.  Which she never does with me so I was obviously thrilled.  Though I tried hard not to show it.  Which I probably didn't really accomplish.

Bottom line, life was pretty crazy in the spring and then quiet and weird at the start of the summer.  Running, as I know it, was on the back burner for a while as I focused on getting my energy back and just spending as much quality time as I could with my family.  It's now late July and I've finally turned a corner with my health.  Thus, I'm also slowly starting to ramp it back up as far as my training goes.  All my racing this fall (5 miler, 10 miler, marathon) will have a team focus for a change, which I am super excited about.  At this stage in the game it's a lot more fun to compete with friends who share the same goal then to keep chasing the solo goals on my own.  On top of that, I'm guessing starting the school year off with only one kid in the house will be very different, fun, sad, quiet, strange, all of the above.  And I suppose all of this will give me a few more things to blog about as we close out the year.  So perhaps I'll keep things going for a little while longer.  This was, indeed, a mega rambler.  Thanks, as always, for following along.  

Listen to this:

This by OK Go

OK Go · This