Category Archives: Blogging

  • The sky has been like a watercolor painting this week, big blue with fast-moving voluminous clouds, green and gold and thick soft air. Some days it is too hot to run outside and even when the cool front moved through, it was extremely humid and I had to walk a few paces at every half-mile of my lunchtime run. I reflected that a couple of years ago, taking any walking steps during my run was distressing to me – an indication of a failed training opportunity. I wondered if I should be pushing myself harder.  Then I remembered that I’m still setting personal bests in the short runs I’ve done this summer, and I’m enjoying running more than ever. I am not competing with myself or with anyone, I’m just enjoying being outside and the feeling that comes from regular activity.
  • I’m staying motivated by signing up for smaller events every 2-3 weeks. I found a 4-mile run for our local Founder’s Festival, and in August we have the annual Farmington Run for the Hills, which I will do as a 10k. I love these smaller runs in my hometown because they are usually community-oriented, for good causes, and have a very upbeat, grass-roots feel. (Plus, I can roll out of bed a half-hour before and ride my bike to the start.) Then in September I will do the Kensington Challenge 15k, and start ramping up training for October in Empire. I love the Sleeping Bear Half Marathon and although I don’t really expect to bust out a PR this year – last year the stars were totally in alignment – it’s such a nice event and the weather is terribly, excitingly unpredictable and it’s my favorite time of year to run.
  • I finally spent my birthday money on a couple new pairs of running shorts, tank tops, and some new socks. I’m slowly replacing my ragged old Athleta sports bras – which are like strapping on Viking breastplates – with a fabulous VS sports bra that I found – The Standout. It’s so comfortable and the racerback straps are cute, it’s been a great find and as someone who is slightly more top-heavy than the average runner girl, a good underpinning is almost as important as good shoes.
  • I like running and I like blogging so why is it that there are so few women’s running blogs that I enjoy reading? Most that I check out are too over the top for me. Instead of being motivational and inspiring, I find them to be a litany of accomplishments and selfies of their muscles and race photos. Don’t get me wrong – if you have the stones to be doing halfs and fulls and tris and Ironman events, you have put an inordinate amount of work into it and you deserve to feel very proud of yourself. I just don’t necessarily want to read about it, I guess. There are a few good running blogs that I like – but I feel as though I like them not because they’re running blogs, but rather they’re blogs by women who happen to run, and do a lot of other things too. They seem more balanced.

I know that nothing about this seems very well-structured, but it’s okay to me. When I started running a few years ago, I essentially stopped blogging. All the hobbies I’d enjoyed suddenly seemed sort of trivial compared with my split times, my aching muscles and minor injuries, my goals and gradual accomplishments. I felt as though I had nothing to say, and it was time to stop talking. Now, I’ve found my voice again, without losing my stride, and even if the things I want to say are trivial and unstructured, I like being able to say them.

live authentic part II

I felt bad after my very cynical ‘live authentic’ post and guilty that perhaps I’d oversimplified things. It’s easy to do that in a blog post. You’re sort of shooting for this mixture of insouciance and humor and poignancy and you frequently let one element outweigh the others and miss the mark.

I thought about it a lot today and came to the conclusion that for me, living authentic isn’t about trying to make my life look or seem easy or beautiful, it’s about trying to isolate and identify the beauty and happiness lurking inside my everyday life and feel gratitude. There’s a tail-wagging-the-dog difference and to me, that difference is the actual element of authenticity. When you’re able to look at your life holistically, the good and the bad, and yet value and appreciate the quicksilver moments of elegance and happiness and loveliness, you are living authentically. At the age of nearly-41, I feel like I’ve only recently discovered this and will likely spend the rest of my life working on it. But it’s good work to do.

I have all the moments that I described in my last post and no, they aren’t the moments that get photographed. I don’t shoot selfies of my overfed tummy or unshaven legs or circles under my eyes when I’ve gotten insufficient sleep. I shoot selfies when I feel beautiful. I don’t take pictures of the endless dead seedling trays I’ve baked or over or under-watered, I take pictures of my beautiful flowers and herbs when they are at their peak and I am proud of them. I don’t take pictures of endless streams of traffic instead of walks in the woods and I don’t brag about the runs that are failures of fatigue and laziness and bathroom issues or shin splints, I feel exuberant about the ones where I feel like I could run and run and run and never get tired. And the ‘living authentic’ part is realizing that all of those elements exist all the time and ebb and flow and they all make up your day or your week and you choose what to be happy and proud of, and what you want to project to the world. I think this is the silver linings playbook, to capture a thought from one of my favorite reads of 2013.

Today I went to work and I had too much to do and I felt that bitterness of not being able to putter around and do exactly what I wanted to do in the comfort and solitude of my own home. And yet I had the kind of day where the relationships I’ve forged with the people I work with made me change my mind. I helped people, I accomplished things and they gave back in return. I had a CAD engineer excitedly consult with me about setting up a possible webcam for Mommy duck. I had my small cadre of teammates set up an outing for next week so I can take them to my favorite botanical gardens to see an 80-year old agave cactus bloom, something I never thought anyone around me would be remotely interested in. I had people in my office all day for one reason or another, laughing and talking and asking questions and making plans and working on strategy and developing ideas together. I had a beautiful lunchtime run in the sunshine and came back with a sunburned nose. I had dinner with my daughter and we lay in the hammock while we ate our ice cream and my shorts were too tight, and we watched the pine branches overhead, very green against the blue sky. Mommy duck went away and came home and the fish swam in his tank while the cats stared, hypnotized. I took the trash out and saw a pale moon shadow in the sky, waiting for the gloaming. All of these things happened and then I felt sad for my harsh and negative commentary about what is in actuality a very nice and sweet pair of words. For the time being, I’ve found a nice place in the world and I am lucky to share even the most tedious bits of my existence with good people and the gratitude that I feel and project is now for me the most authentic way to live.

live authentic

I loved this post on A Side of Sweet about what I informally think of as “the new YOLO” – the hashtag “live authentic” which at first glance can seem very positive and motivating and inspirational but, as Kelly’s post points out, can really just be annoying as all hell and make those of us who are actually forced to work for a living doing distinctly unbeautiful things feel a bit, shall we say, inadequate.

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I wish my life was all about PeonyWatch2014, naps with beautiful yogaesque cats, communing with ducks, walks in the woods and going for long runs wearing perfectly coordinated Nike outfits while I “live authentically”. And I DO get to do some of that, sometimes (okay, I don’t have any perfectly coordinated outfits of any kind, much less for running). But more often than not, my version of living authentically is sitting in traffic or in my office thinking, talking, or writing about widgets, packing lunches, wishing my house wasn’t so cluttered, wishing I had time for a nap or a run, missing my kid, checking my finances, wondering what to read next, wishing I had time to weed the garden, feeling tired, feeling hungry, feeling fat, wondering if it’s almost time to eat, wondering if it’s almost time to go home, wondering if we need more wine, negotiating who does bedtime reading or lunch packing, going to bed at 8PM with the intention of reading but instead exhaustedly watching a rerun of the Real Housewives of Somewhere while berating myself for not cleaning the litterbox and feeling annoyed with the cats for breaking something or dragging a shoe upstairs to chew on (really). And then getting up the next day to do it all over again.

on going out and coming home

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I try not to talk much about a variety of topics on the internetz, including my work and my personal relationships and now, as she gets older, my daughter, whose life and image and thoughts and feelings belong to her, not me to share with the general public. But I’ve been through a lot over the past year, and there were many days when I just didn’t think I could get out of bed and face the day.

All my life, I have felt that I needed someone else to trust and to lean on, because inside I never trusted my own self to get me through hard times. I felt fundamentally unreliable and flawed. When I faced a challenge, I never truly believed I had the ability to get through it.

It’s a terrible weakness, not to trust or like your own self, and although I wish I could change many things that have happened lately, the silver lining of all of it is that I finally know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can get through what I have to, and that I am more than I ever thought I was. Part of me hates to see that written out in black and white, because my old self would feel that was tempting the universe to knock my feet out from underneath me. I don’t think like that anymore. Now I think the universe is more receptive, it’s something that responds to the energy you put out into it, and gives it back, and if you wake up every day to see the beauty in what is around you and feel gratitude for it, and love the people in your life and what you have been given, and you work to be happy, the universe responds to that. The only person who is responsible for your happiness is you.

This is a long way of saying that I flew across the country this week, and visited new places, and saw new things. I spoke in front of groups of people and laughed with them and made friends. I wasn’t perfect, but I was real, and I wasn’t afraid, and everywhere I looked I saw sunshine and warmth and new things. I trusted myself and enjoyed myself and when I came home, I was so happy for the little life I have here. California was hot and dry and bright, the Santa Ana winds moving restlessly through the palm trees against the blue sky. Traffic wound in glittering ropes along the asphalt. There were people everywhere, great waves of people pressing in on all sides. When I wasn’t presenting, during our car trips and at the airport, I couldn’t even speak for staring around me.

And then I came home, and my world was small and damp and green, full of cats and a chattering child, cluttered with construction paper and crayons and toys. I dreamt last night of five cardinals in the branches above me, and picking up a small colored bird, thinking it was dead, and having it come alive in my hand, fragile and prickly. I liked coming home the best of all. It’s so strange to feel that at the age of 40, I’ve been newly born into something I never was before. I have such a short life left to enjoy, I’d better get to it.

to read

terri windling writes a beautiful blog with beautiful pictures, and her ‘into the woods’ has been fascinating – a very thought-provoking, extensively researched series on mythical archetypes, fairy tales and literature.

highly recommend.