So I’m on a roll today and I’m just blasting through my to do list. I woke up earlier again, just before 6am, and I feel much clearer and calmer today than I have done lately. I should only have a normal amount of work today, and then hopefully a couple of days off work to catch up on life stuff before a very packed long weekend.
The last few days I think I’ve been really distracted by this feeling of being behind, exacerbated by waking up really late and actually being behind where I would normally be in my daily schedule. I’ve felt really muddled, really tired, and just totally obsessed with running as well, which has kept distracting me too.
So it’s nice today to just feel much more focused and able to calmly work through the to do list, item by item, without too much indecision or worry. What’s also helped is that last night I completely shut down all the windows on my laptop and turned it off properly, and it makes a big difference when you turn it on in the morning and have a blank page. If my email is already open, I’m much more likely to get distracted by it. I can’t help noticing all the stuff that’s come in overnight, and I’m really behind with dealing with my inbox after the busyness of the last week so that’s a massive distraction and a cause of anxiety which is not what you need when you want to have a nice calm morning routine and do some writing first thing.
Sometimes, when I’m busy like I have been over the last few days, I’m tempted to ditch the writing, and in fact I did ditch it over the weekend. I just didn’t have time before running, due to not waking up as early as I normally do, and then after running I had work to get done, which I only just had time for. So, when I’m busy like that, writing can feel like an unnecessary indulgence and kind of pointless and not moving the needle. But, really, it’s more important than ever at those times.
It grounds me and it calms me and it helps me to work through the problems that might be hiding under the surface, ready to come out when I write for a prolonged amount of time. I find a useful way into writing is to start by writing down three things I’m grateful for, if I’m feeling grateful! But sometimes I’ll wake up grumpy and I’ll just need to write down all the things I’m grumpy about before the gratitude can come out! When I try to bottle up or push down the grumpiness, it just doesn’t work. I end up blocked and even if I try to force out a gratitude list, it just feels fake or even sarcastic!
I’ve been wondering why running has become a total obsession again, why it hasn’t been an obsession for the last few months, whether it’s a good or a bad thing for it to be an obsession, and if it’s a good thing, how do I prevent it from becoming not an obsession again.
I’m busy making plans for my future running. But I know I’ve been here many times before, and sometimes the plans work, sort of, but mostly, to be completely honest, they don’t. The reality is usually so much harder than I think it will be. I get tired, I can’t achieve what I think I should be achieving. I get ridiculously hungry, then overeat and put weight on again, then don’t run as well.
I feel like it shouldn’t be this hard, and I’m doing something wrong somewhere.
It is, I think, mostly my all-or-nothing nature. I do go through big ups and downs. I’ll go through phases of just having no energy whatsoever and watching a lot of TV, wasting a lot of time, getting almost nothing done. Then, I’ll go through phases of having an absolute ton of ideas and making loads of new plans.
It’s sort of frustrating. From the outside it might not look like I’m doing anything very different. But I can feel it. I suppose, for the last few months, it’s not that I’ve just been going through the motions but more that I didn’t feel like I could do anything more than four runs a week. I was building mileage for my half marathon and I didn’t have the time or energy to do more than that.
At the moment, although I do have this ultra coming up, I actually feel suddenly freed, and there seems to be a lot more room for choices in my training. I’ve put in more mileage, and I feel fairly comfortable with it, whereas before it was all I could do to get the 30 miles a week in.
I’m excited too, because I feel like I’ve picked up some new ideas for my training, which I haven’t really ever considered before. I think I’ve felt stuck for a while now, in this fixed idea of doing the session at my running club on a Tuesday as hard as I can, which sometimes isn’t hard at all if I’m achey or tired, and then running parkrun on a Saturday as hard as I can. That was all I felt I could do. I couldn’t see any other possibilities.
Realising that I actually have probably been limiting my progress by trying too hard in those sessions, and not really being strategic with them, has been a bit of a spark and that’s what’s made me more enthusiastic about running again. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying earlier this year. It was more that I’d got myself into a rut, without realising it, and so there wasn’t really anything to think about or plan for or get excited about.
I’ve been really inspired, as well, by getting back into watching some running YouTubers. I’d turned away from them for a while after my marathon training ended in tears last September because I felt that the high mileage I’d been doing for that marathon had contributed to me getting ill, and I didn’t want to be influenced by these YouTubers to increase my mileage again. I still feel some confusion over the fact that everyone says you need to run more miles to improve, but every time I do that, I seem to get ill and need to take time off from running. But I am interested to see if reducing the intensity of my faster runs might help with that. Also I’d like to try to get back onto a regular mileage level, and just sit there for a few months, while I work on the speed again, because I have found in the past that it’s increasing the mileage that makes me really tired, but once I do get up to a particular level and just stick there, it can be easier.
So we’ll have to see how it goes, and to be honest I feel like I’m getting to the end of everything I really needed to work through regarding running, so hopefully I’ll get back to thinking about spirituality and ACIM and LOA again, and then also some more life hacks and habits and stuff like that over the next few weeks. For now, as I’ve said before, I’m just really happy to be blogging regularly again, and just happy to let the topics be whatever is on my mind each morning.