Training While Life Happens?
Bless me, for I have sinned. It’s been seven weeks since my last essay.
It’s not that nothing has happened in that time. Quite the opposite, in fact. I sailed the Caribbean for eight days. I spent a stimulating holiday season with both my family and my partner Kim’s family. I drove through a snowstorm to get to a cabin in Tahoe. I survived well-below-freezing temperatures on my return to Montana.
Those were all bracing experiences for me, and they all gave me varying degrees of contentedness, satisfaction, even joy. They’ve left me feeling pretty good about myself.
But I fear they’re a little boring to everyone else.
I didn’t advance the ball on self-awareness. I didn’t discover a latent skill. I didn’t have an experience that transcended my consciousness or one that challenged me to reconsider a closely-held truth. I didn’t have a breakthrough that brought me emotionally closer to someone or a rupture that caused me emotional pain.
In other words, I didn’t learn anything substantively new.
Affirmation is all well and good. All feedback is a gift, and when that feedback says that you’re on the right path, that no course needs to be corrected, well, that’s pretty encouraging, right? It’s kind of where we all want to be.
But it makes for lousy reading.
So I haven’t been writing.
I wish I could say I’ve been working out. Actually, I will say it. But it hasn’t been with purpose or really much commitment. An elliptical workout here, a hike or long walk there, a run or two thrown in for good measure. All workouts are good, but without structure they don’t do much to advance a goal.
I still want to qualify for the Boston Marathon. But I will need to find a lot more focus if I’m to make that happen.
The past seven weeks have shown me that I have a very full life. Which is good. I hate waste, and since time is the one resource that is not replenishable I really hate wasting time. But it also means that I don’t have much capacity to take on new things. And while BQ-ing isn’t a new goal, training for it will mean adding to my life.
I’ve qualified for Boston before, and when I prepared for it then — fifteen years ago — I had a very stable life. Creating space for the runs, for the core-strength sessions, for the cross-training, for the meal-planning, for the race planning was a challenge for sure, but the sacrifices I had to make to accommodate the BQ training weren’t especially significant. I hesitate to even call them sacrifices, because I can’t think of a thing I gave up that mattered much to me.
It’s different now.
I feel coupled with Kim, so creating time with her is important to me. I am editing the short stories I’ve written during the past year, and I’m about to begin writing the novel I’ve had in mind for about twenty years, so protecting the time I need to write is important to me. My parents are in their eighties and my daughters are both in their twenties, and they all live away from me, so making time to connect with each of them is important to me. I have dozens of friends whose company I enjoy immensely, so spending time with them is important to me.
That’s quite a bit of time to accommodate.
I also have a flailing business that refuses to go away, and though I resent the time it demands I feel grudgingly obligated to tend to it. Which adds to the time I cannot devote to BQ training.
But this isn’t new ground, and my time during the past seven weeks didn’t illuminate any yellow-brick road that will deliver me painlessly to my marathon goal. So I’ll need to add to my full plate the commitments that will get me to a Boston attempt, and then stir them into the mix. I’ve always believed that our priorities are exposed by our actions, and so the next few months will show just how important this BQ attempt is to me.
Relative to everything else I have in my life, of course.
