Editions of Me

If you know me, you know that I have a laaaaaaaaarge range of interests and roles and responsibilities. At the moment, I'm juggling my roles as a mom/partner/daughter/sister/friend/etc with my job as a high school English teacher, with my hobbies and interests (running, lifting, knitting, reading, blogging/social media, makeup), along with just the everyday responsibility of keeping myself healthy and alive. (You have no idea how often I forget to eat or to go to bed on time.) So the one question that inevitably comes up often is "How do you do it all? Where do you find the time?" I've thought long and hard about how to answer this question, and here's what I came up with: I actually don't.  I don't do it all . Not at the same time, anyway. I look at my life as a collection of rotating pieces, and at any given time, some pieces are in action and other pieces are not. If I tried to get everything firing all at the same time, I would drive myself m...

There is tons of advice out there for new runners, especially around this time of year. Anyone who is interested can find any number of articles and training plans about how to get started running. What they don't always tell you is just how many times you might end up being a "beginning runner." For whatever reason - illness, injury, etc - you might find yourself starting over from scratch again and again. Or maybe you aren't starting over, but maybe it's your first time training for a particular distance or terrain or climate. I'm finding myself starting over again right now for the umpteenth time in my life, and each time, it does get easier. Each time, I know myself a little better. Each time, I want it a little bit more. I don't have the most linear trajectory of progress when it comes to my running, but the fact that I have achieved some pretty lofty goals makes me more eager to try my best to get back to my previous personal level of excellen...

Lines recited by another beloved actor we lost recently, Robin Williams I woke up this morning to news that Alan Rickman had passed away, just a few days after the passing of David Bowie. Both men, in different ways, with their different talents, had a huge impact on me, and I feel like life will be a little less rich for them being gone. We also recently lost singer Natalie Cole and BAMF Lenny Kilmeister. And I may not have been their biggest fans, but I enjoyed their (very different) music too. This process of mourning the loss of people we never knew is kind of weird, I'll just say it. On the one hand, it feels strange to miss someone you've never met; I mean, you can't lose someone if they were never yours. On the other hand, they were "ours," in a way, weren't they? I mean, they weren't ours personally, but through their unique talents, they shared pieces of themselves with the masses. And because the way that each of us processes art is uniq...

I don't have much to recap in terms of race performance - I literally just wanted to do this race for the jacket and the chocolate :) I did this one two years ago and had a great time - it's fun and well-organized, and now that they offer packet mailing (for an extra fee), it made things really easy. (I just made sure to go with a friend who doesn't share my phobia of driving in San Francisco.) I've been completely inactive for the last couple of weeks due to being on vacation and then being sick, so I haven't even been lifting, let alone running. I knew better than to attempt any outlandish feats of athleticism - I just showed up, sans watch, told myself that I'd run small portions if I felt like it, and walk when I didn't. I ended up finishing in just under 58:00, which I feel is a victory for me, because it's right at my target walking pace and so far (six hours later), my knee is pain-free. *knock on wood* If my knee continues to feel well, t...

The horizon, hazy as ever I've been holding off on writing a New Year's resolutions/goals post, because to be honest, I'm not sure what I want to say yet. Because if there's one thing 2015 taught me, it's that no matter what your goals are, life's curveballs can change everything. When I started 2015, my plan was to run three marathons by the year's end. So... on the one hand, I completely failed to meet the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year. Like, I never even made it to the start line for any of those three marathons. I had early on given up on the second one, in order to give myself a bigger recovery/training gap after the first one, but then I realized I was so burnt out on training that I forced myself to back off from running entirely. I took an extended physical and mental break from running at all for a couple months, and when it came time to start building up my base mileage again to train for the third (now only ) marathon ...