Mile 20

Thursday, June 29, 2006




It's the second day after I have decided to run the Myrtle Beach Marathon for my 20th birthday and I'm starting to wonder if I'm not entirely insane. Of course, yesterday it was my hot topic of the day and I couldn't help but tell everyone. Today though I was randomly sleepy and I started thinking about how far 18 miles, much less 26, really is. Doubtless this will be one of the most intense periods of my life.
Anyways, welcome to the mental side of my training! It's still June and I'm desperate to go back to Chapel Hill and start making progress in school. When I left school I was just crushed. Physics crushed me mentally, financial issues and lack of communication with my parents had me crushed emotionally, moral instability had me crushed spiritually and all of this burden was bearing down on me physically. After finals I just slept for a week. I knew that I was missing a lot of foundational respect for myself and in the weeks of May I started to deal with those issues that exhausted me.
I have a couple of months before my formal training starts and so I have time to make things easier for myself. This will be a challenge since I'll be in NY this week but first I hope to loose 15 pounds to make running easier. Next I want to run 6 miles 2 times a week and then upgrade to 4 times a week.
This upcoming year I really hope to train myself to live. I don't know what I'm doing wrong or why my hard work is not matching the output I receive. I think I've been thoroughly disappointed for the past 5 years because I couldn't find that junction or what Csikszentmihalyi calls "the flow". Even though everything looks clearer in retrospect, I know that at least in 8th grade, and maybe 11th, I had the flow. I wonder if I've cheated myself into giving up because I thought I couldn't live perfectly.
There's something for me to learn at this Mile 20 and that is that there is something to acchieve at mile 26.

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