"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof."
-Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (via girlwithoutwings)(Source: quote-book)
How I’m getting through my thesis.
Running and this.
Lots and lots of this.
Running for the morning
I am not a morning runner.
Let me rephrase that: I am not a morning runner. Since I started running almost 6 years ago, I was a late afternoon/evening runner exclusively. To the point where I began to believe I was not even capable of running at any other time of day.
Sometimes I would be ready to go, shoes on, and discovering it was only 4pm, I would just…wait until it got a little later. Wait until I could drain away the stress of the day, the tiredness behind my eyes, as the sky was draining its light.
Eventually, my love for and dedication to running required that I be a little more flexible: running at 2pm or —Heaven forbid!—as early as noon! Running 5ks and the like were the only exceptions I made to the no-AM-runs-rule, and did so grudgingly.
Last fall, in the midst of personal and grad school-induced trauma, I took the Runner’s World challenge to run at least one mile per day from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. Great way to stay active through the holidays, plus combat the enormous stress I was under. Little did I anticipate just how often the only time to fit in the daily mile+ would be in the AM hours…
And by the third week of the challenge, I was finding just how much I…well, kinda liked running in morning! Got it done, could reap the emotional & energy benefits of the run all day long…but still, when the challenge was over, I rarely went out in the morning.
This weekend, when my thesis defense date was unexpectedly moved up three weeks, I decided that I was going to need some help getting through the next month before graduation. Big time. Long, strenuous days of writing ahead to cramp three lost weeks of work into about 10 days.
So, I committed to my own challenge: at least one mile per day from April 6 to May 20.
It is Day 4, which as I recall is the day my legs say, “Alrighty friend, just what do you think you are doing?” (I’ve been an every-other-day kinda gal for the most part). I didn’t make it out this morning at 6 like I had wanted to: the thesis beckoned, and here I have sat for most of the day. This challenge will be different as I make the last major push through the rewarding and rigorous graduate school experience, and watch the world spring back to green instead of fading into winter.
A few years ago I read an article that said running the dark “takes a special kind of faith.” And it does: in the dark, you face a lot more about yourself while running than you do with the whole world buzzing about, providing distraction. There is an honesty to it, a trust that you will stay safe, and a faith that once again running will make life just a little better than it was when you first stepped out the door.
There is a certain catharsis to running at night, but I’m finding there is an equally intoxicating perspective that comes from running in the dark before dawn.
This time, I am really looking forward to those morning runs.
"If I do not love the world
–if I do not love life–
–if I do not love people–
I cannot enter into dialogue."
-Paulo Freire
“The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters.
“You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. But you, will never be merely ‘pretty’.”
- Katie Makkai
