Category: Running

I run a lot, and sometimes I write about it. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Things don’t always have to mean something!

Late Night Write

Pavowski2 Comments

Getting the writing done a little bit later than I’d rather.  But such is life.  I still have yet to miss a day or a deadline, and that’s something.  In fact, I sat down to write tonight at 9pm telling myself, “just get the 900 words and sack out,” and my ink-crazed id-writer half kept me going all the way to 1400 words, where my clearer-thinking half realized that if the rest of us didn’t get together and stop him soon, he might keep us up and writing all night, so we tagged him with the tranq gun (yeah, there’s a tranq gun in my head for when my other mes get out of hand, what do YOU use??) and he’s taking a little nappy-nap now.  And YES, it’s considered to be late at night at 10:30, I’m the parent of a toddler and THIS IS MY LIFE.

Spring Break is halfway over — actually more than halfway, now that today’s at an end — and that’s sad.

Two things from today.

First of all, I had my first post-podiatrist run on my not-actually-shattered foot, now infused with cortisone, AKA liquefied unicorn horn, AKA jumpin’ jamba juice, AKA I-don’t-know-what-pain-is-anymore happy medicine.  Seriously, in my first contiguous three-mile run in over a month, I felt not a tweak of pain or discomfort or “wrongness” in the heel, and nothing since.  Not only was there no pain, but I found myself running faster and easier than I have in months.  I kept going faster than I wanted to and reminding myself to slow down, which, for a runner, is sort of like asking your torturers to give you a few more lashes and really take their time with the thumbscrews.  The run over, I iced it and stretched the foot, per doctor’s orders, and for today at least, it’s holding up fine.

What’s not holding up fine, on the other hand, are my lungs, for two reasons.  First, I’m out of shape.  Not running consistently since basically December has reduced my conditioning to (for me) pitiful levels, and I cut the run short today as much out of an inability to breathe enough as out of caution not to overwork the heel.  Second, spring seems to have sprung here in Georgia, and if you’ve ever been in Georgia in the merry merry months of springtime, you know that the trees are mating, and their yellow, uh, genetic legacy just lays like a blanket over EVERYTHING.  We had an honest-to-goodness deluge of rain at the beginning of the week, and in the two days since, the pollen has piled up enough that our blue car is now blue-under-a-fine-misting-of-vomit-yellow.  The breeze stirs and you see it swirling like a desert sandstorm.  The trees rustle and it comes cascading down like the yellow snowfall of your nightmares.  When it rains again, the rivers and streams will look like streams of snot.  So me, I go out for my first run in a week, and as much as it’s a nice day out, I’m breathing in these coarse particulates by the metric sharknado-ton.  Oh, but I’m not breathing so much as gasping for my life, so I don’t even have the benefit of the filtration system in the nose, no, it’s all going straight down the gullet and powdering the inside of my lungs.  I feel confident that if you could shine a blacklight into my trachea, my entire respiratory system would fluoresce with this gunk.

So I’m hacking up what looks like powdered yellow-cake uranium, but I had a good run, so that’s awesome.  And I got my writing done for today, and that’s awesome too.

I wish there was more cleverness to be had in this post, but the id-writer is snoring so hard over there with that dart in his neck that he woke the neighbor’s dog up.  Nothing but drool and night terrors for that guy.  What a mess.

Modern Medicine is Magic (a running post in which you can see the inside of my foot and it looks like a horror movie)

Pavowski1 Comment

So I’m a runner.

I caught this disease almost two years ago (no, it was earlier than that, but I date it from my first race which was on Cinco de Mayo, a “holiday” whose legitimacy it is not the goal of this blarg to explore) and have since embraced it, the way Rainman kinda leans into the skid and accepts that while he may never be a dashing, smooth-talking ladies man, hey, he can count the balls off some beans.

That is to say, running is not the best of hobbies to have.

Let me clarify that.  I call it a hobby because in a lot of ways it’s no longer about the exercise, it’s about the meditation, the focus it brings, and yeah, let’s be fair, it’s still in no small part about the exercise, but let’s push that aside for now, I’m going somewhere here.  Yes, hobby.  A hobby is something you enjoy doing, something that eats up a (often unhealthily [yes, unhealthily, shut up]) disproportionate amount of your time (money, thought, money, sense of a well-rounded life, money…), and as I’ve mentioned before, for a sport that professes to be about simplicity and an escape from big gyms and monthly fees and expensive equipment, you can drop a fargoing bundle on running gear. And it’s not the best of hobbies to have because it becomes difficult, when you have a (growing) family and a (beyond) full-time job and, let’s not forget, I also just took up capital-w Writing as another hobby (because I have time for that like I have hair on my head [spoiler alert: the key word is “shortage”]), to make time for Everything Which Must Be Accomplished Today.  Less so when you start out and it’s a twenty- to thirty-minute jaunt here and there, more so when you really lose your mind and begin running for nearly an hour at a time four or five times a week, and two hours on the weekend (because daddy needs his long run, no I don’t have a problem just GIVE ME THAT LONG RUN).

Anyway, there’s a problem with running and it’s this:

Dondraper it, let me try again.  There are some problems with running, and one of them is this:

Nope, still not there.

Running is a problem.

Here’s one reason.  We’re built to run, sure, great, fantastic.  The body and its legion of interconnected systems combine to make humans one of the kings of distance runners on our little blue slice of life.  However, most of us lazy Americans don’t give running a try until we’re old enough to know better.  Our lives of leisure and sedentary work and Law-and-Order marathons have caused those finely tuned systems to atrophy.  So we jump into running, and it hurts.  It fargoing HURTS.  Blisters, shin splints, sun burn, broken toenails, bloody nipples, ALL of these things can happen, sometimes within your first few steps out the door.  And a lot of people try it for a week and it hurts TOO DONDRAPER MUCH and they quit.  Hard to fault them.  Others think, “hey, this hurts, but it’s kind of awesome too,” and they keep at it.

Now, the body adapts fast.  It builds up resilience quickly.  And as any runner who makes it past, say , three months (I just made that figure up, but let’s go with it because this is my house) will tell you, once you get to the point where you can run a few miles, the rest is mental.  So if you didn’t drop out when it started hurting (which was immediately), you’re unlikely to drop out barring serious injury, and you’ll keep pushing up the mileage and the duration and you’ll find yourself smashing through your own boundaries and personal achievement and yay yay yay I’m awesome, running is awesome, the world is awesome, yay running.

Problem is, running is not like other sports.  You don’t take spikes to the knee making a tag at second, you don’t get a three-hundred pound linebacker smashing your brains into mush on every snap, you don’t take ice skates to the teeth when the puck does the thing with the hockey implements.  Okay, I don’t know a lot about hockey injuries, but I HAVE AN IMAGINATION AND ICE SKATES ARE DANGEROUS AND THOSE GUYS ARE BIG AND FAST.  Running injuries are subtle.  Like a fine wine (except that they crush your soul rather than bringing sweet, sweet music into it), running injuries develop over time.  Figure a conservative 1000 strides per mile times an average of 4 miles per run (my average in 2013)  times let’s just say I ran every other day last year and that’s a Holy Sharknado lot of steps you’ve taken, each one magnifying the entropy that your thirty-year old (indulge me) frame has slid into over the past YOUR WHOLE LIFE of not doing anything active outside of an occasional game of yard football.

So, my feet hurt.  And they finally hurt badly enough and longly enough (yep) for me to go see a doctor.

X-rays, poking and prodding, lots of questions.

Turns out that while I have no structural deficiencies (no broken bones or heel spurs or stress fractures or duck-feet), I do have a mild form of plantar fasciitis.  The phrase the doctor used was “you have a high arch, but your foot is behaving as if your arch is flat.”  I asked him what the haberdashery that meant, and he responded with words that may have been answers, but I still have no idea what he actually said.  Basically, I think what he said is that because I have healthy feet and because I have good running form, I’m overworking the plantar fascia (the tendons along the underside of the foot) and then they recede and shrink up like your business in a cold pool when I go to sleep at night, then they get extra stretched out again when I run again, wash, rinse, repeat.  (Healthy feet + good form, then, equals injury.  THIS IS RUNNING.)

The treatment?  Stretch it and ice it.  Seriously, that’s it.  He gave me a cortisone shot (I’ll come back to that) and some pills to take if I have more pain (the pills may cause a slight evacuation of my stomach contents, so, you know, USE SPARINGLY) and a see-you-in-a-month.

Two things bear mentioning from my little visit with my healthcare professional.

First, x-rays.

wpid-imag0945.jpgThose are goldfinger alien appendages.  Seriously.  From the above angle they look like the long, taloned claws of the grim-reaper dunked in phosphorescent goo (and, by the way, look at the big bone [the tarsal?  Go science yourself] just below the “toe joints” [yeah, SCIENCE] and tell me those don’t look like demonic slitted eyes gazing into your soul.  SERIOUSLY WHAT ARE THOSE).  And then…

wpid-imag0946.jpg

If you’ve seen the first thirty seconds of Terminator 2, I need say no more.  If not, what are you doing here?  Go watch it.  Anyway, that’s a fargoing cyborg death-claw-foot, not a human extremity.

Second, the shot.  We’ve all had them.  Shot in the arm; if the doctor likes you he’ll tell you an amusing anecdote about fly fishing or his fourth-grader’s art project and you’ll be so bored you won’t even notice the needle sliding in, and then it’s over.  Dentist shots aren’t so quick or painless but at least you can’t see it happening so there’s that.

A cortisone shot is different.  First of all, the needle is longer than anything piercing your skin has any right to be.  My stomach did a backflip as soon as he uncorked the thing and I was literally unable to look away from it; all I could think was how it could possibly penetrate my flesh that much without causing searing, blinding pain.  The doc assures me that he’ll freeze the skin and I won’t feel anything except a little pulling.  Okay, sure, but I still can’t take my eyes off the thing.  He sprays a stream of this liquid at my heel and it feels like I’ve dunked the thing in a supercooled ice bath; the needle goes in and sure enough, I feel nothing.  But I see it.  The needle goes in and in and in, like a snake down a drain.  (Real or plumber’s, you decide!)  Then it stops, and he begins to depress the plunger.

Emptying the syringe takes him at least a minute.  Part of it’s because he’s deliberately going slow, which he explains is to allow the medicine to empty into the tissue without displacing things too rapidly, which would cause serious pain and discomfort.  The other part is that, its, uh, payload is dramatically big.  Again, all I have for reference are those doctor’s office inoculations, so maybe my scale is broken like the pollen count mechanism here in Georgia… but I won’t get sidetracked on that (tonight!).  3 ccs, he says.  Anyway, he’s sitting there pushing this clear fluid into the side of my heel and my eyes are just frozen to it like a five year old’s tongue to a light pole in winter, and I keep saying “uh huh, right, sure” to whatever he says in his reassuring voice.  It goes on too long, and my skin looks like one of those closeups of water that you see where the surface isn’t broken, it’s lifting up and sticking to the sides of the straw or string or whatever’s stuck in it, and I’m thinking of all that fluid oozing into my heel and oh my god, where is all that stuff going, it’s not my bloodstream because that’s not the point, and I feel myself getting dizzy.

Lunch almost comes up, but just like that, it’s over, the swordfish spike comes out of my heel, and he’s wiping it off with alcohol.  “All done,” he says, and I ask the question I’ve been afraid to ask because I’m somehow certain the answer will be no: “can I keep running?”

He laughs a little.  “Oh, sure.  I mean, don’t go running six miles on it tonight or anything, but you can return to your regular activities in a day or two.  Just keep stretching and icing.  Now the nurse will come in for your ultrasound.”

Thank crikey.  Wait, what?

The nurse comes in with this wand which makes no sound, not least of all ultra (okay, I apologize to the readers for the horribleness of that joke, but no, I’m not taking it back).  She slathers it with goop and rubs it all over my heel and the back part of the bottom of my foot for a good five minutes, explaining that this will distribute the cortisone all throughout the soft tissues of my foot.  Small talk about our kids (being a parent somehow makes small talk in odd situations so much easier than it ever was in the years BS (before sprout).  Then she’s done, she packs it all up, and sends me on my way, telling me to be careful the rest of the day and not take part in any strenuous physical activity because my foot is going to feel a little numb.

That clear fluid from the syringe, the cortisone, is made of fairy tears or unicorn pee or something.  I put my heels to the ground and feel nothing but a dull tingling in my ENTIRE left foot, like I’d sat on it funny for an hour and it has that pins-and-needles thing going on.  This feeling lasted for the entire rest of the day.  No pain, just that bizarre, stars-exploding-in-my-nerve-endings kind of feeling every time I take a step.

I wake up this morning and the sharp pain I’m used to feeling in my heel on my first steps of the day is just gone.  I rouse the sprout (okay, he was already roused and chasing his toy dinosaurs around his room) and take him downstairs – the stairs that usually intensify the pain in the heel, and again – nothing.

I won’t be running on it again today, but hopefully before school’s back in, I can take it for a spin and see how it’s doing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: modern medicine is magic.  I learned this firsthand when my son was born with half his insides on the outside, and I’ve learned it again since this doctor was able to pull the evil out of my heel like sucking up milk through a straw.

TOYS.

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I am obsessed with toys.

Not the toys that my toddler leaves strewn about the house.  Those haberdasheryspawned contraptions of plastic and plush and cacophony without cease are the stuff of my nightmares, and I’m convinced that, when I have shrugged off this mortal coil, if hell is waiting for me, then at least one level of it will be a simple living room floor covered with toys that, much like the severed heads of the hydra, only spawn more toys when I try to clean them up.  An ever-growing, inescapable bramble patch of sharp-edged Legos waiting for my tender underfoot, a never-flagging symphony of bells and xylophones and singing woodland creatures.

Ahem.  Not those toys.

I’m talking about adult toys.  NO NOT THOSE ADULT TOYS.  Toys for grown folks.

The problem is, they don’t really make toys for grown folks.  There’s a toy section at Target (Yeah, Target, because FARGO WAL-MART), but it’s for kids.  Toys for grown folks underwent some serious branding a long time back and are now known as “accessories” or “programs” or “electronics” or whatever other title the little odds and ends are for whatever fascinating little squirrel-hole of a hobby you find yourself falling down.  My holes are reserved for things like running and writing and watching movies and maybe I should rethink the phrasing of this sentence.

I should make something clear at the outset here.  I’m a packrat.  It’s awful.  I love stuff.  I really do.  The American credo of getting as much as you can (that’s a thing, right?) has found a happy little home in my brain and I feed it at every opportunity I get.  I find a hobby, or a thing that I love, and I buy all kinds of little useless crap that has anything to do with it.  I’ve got a storage tub full of decks of cards from when I went through a card tricks phase a few years back.  I’ve got boxes in the garage filled with little action figures (THEY’RE NOT DOLLS, SHUT UP) from cartoons (okay, anime) I watched in college.  I’ve got dusty plaques and trophies from when I was less than ten years old.  No less than four sets of serious-ANTZ darts (because, yeah, darts were a thing for me for a while) — the ones that come with their own little carrying case and you have to screw the whole shebang together, feathers and all.  A personalized goldfingered bowling ball from when I was in a bowling league at the age of fifteen.  It’s not memorabilia.  There’s no sentimental value.  It’s my STUFF, man, and I’m a-keepin it.

So I hoard stuff.  And my wife hoards stuff, too.  Like opposite ends of two magnets, we attracted one another, except that like magnets would repel each other, and we’re the same, so the metaphor kind of falls apart at this stage, but sharknado, I’m on a roll here.  Our garage is not a place we like to show off to people.  It’s a repository of our shames.

Because, make no mistake, there is bountiful shame.  I know that, on many levels, it’s ridiculous to have all this stuff.  Who the haberdashery needs thirty decks of playing cards?  And yet, I can’t get rid of it.  Even as I profess to strive for minimalism and simplification in my more recent years, the demons of my past keep working behind my back.  Organizers to decrease desk clutter?  Yes, I’ll take two, and try them for a week, and then put them on the pile of clothes that I keep meaning to donate out in the garage.  A fancy new bag to keep my job stuff organized as I go back and forth from home to work and back?  I’ll take one in blue AND black.  One will live in the back of my car; I will call him Tim, and feed him empty tin cans and drive-thru receipts.  BECAUSE I KEEP THOSE TOO.

New hobbies?  New toys.  With running, it was new shoes, the soles lined with the down of angels to comfort my delicate feet, new socks made of synthetic fibers to absorb shock and sweat (socks that actually care which foot you put them on – seriously, I had never seen socks emblazoned with tiny L’s and R’s before I took up running), a fancy watch which can triangulate my position and tell the government (I mean me) how fast I ran that mile, what neighborhood I ran it in, and how long I was meeting with the terrorist operatives in the woods (wait, what?), new shirts woven of mystical threads to provide legendary comfort and style, hats, gloves, shoes, headphones, all of which are covered with little reflecty bits to ensure that I am not struck by oncoming traffic whilst I’m out pounding pavement when the rest of the world slumbers.  They say running is cheap — all you need is your shoes and you can head out the door.  The romanticism of that idea drew me in.  I shudder to think how much money I’ve “saved” by taking up running rather than or instance shelling out for a gym (which I would not have gone to, that’s off topic, STAY ON TOPIC).

Now, writing!  I am new to Serious Writing (about as new as this blog is, which is to say, not quite a month in), so my list of purchases is still rather short.  BUT NOT NONEXISTENT.  I am typing these very words on a spiffy new bluetooth keyboard with my tablet (the bluetooth keyboard actually makes the tablet totally decent to write on). I bought some e-books, which DON’T COUNT because they don’t take up space, but yeah they still count because they are still representative of my inner slobbering consumerist packrat self.  A new bag, to facilitate carrying the tablet and keyboard as well as my other stuff going back and forth between work and home (yes, I got a new bag a couple paragraphs ago, just… okay?)

And apps!  Holy schlamoly, there are so many apps out there for writers, it’s a wonder that writers haven’t buried the world in the pages produced by all the productivity they’ve gotten out of all these apps. (Because a thing that writers definitely do NOT do is buy all these toys, read all these things, download all these apps, and proceed NOT to write anything of value, right?  Right??)  Dictionary apps and thesaurus apps and blogging apps and word count apps and timer apps to make sure you work undisturbed until time is up and apps that shut down the Internet while you’re working and apps that do all of these and also pour you a nice cup of coffee, just kidding, unless you’re reading this from the year 2020 because surely by then there will be an app for that, right?

My favorite at the moment is a little word processor called WriteMonkey, a stripped-down plain text editor which aims to eliminate distractions and allow you to focus on your writing without the urge to check e-mails, surf the web, watch an hour’s worth of Mental Floss videos… to be fair, the urges are still there, but the program blacks out everything else on your screen, theoretically making it more difficult for you to indulge your urges.  Out of sight, out of mind, and all that. It operates pretty well as advertised.  But the big dumb draw of it for a distractable donut like me is that you can toggle on these little keyboard clicks to make it sound (and, if you’re really into it, look) like you’re typing on an old-school typewriter, complete with a cheerful ding when you hit return.  I know, it’s dumb.  But it sucks me in, man, like a brand-new Dyson.

I punched out a solid 1400 words today to the soft ratatat of classic typewriter keys today, and left myself well-poised to jump right into Tomorrow’s writing (getting started is the toughest part).  Who knows how long these new toys will hold my focus, but I’m gonna keep working them as long as they’re working.

So.  Many.  Things.

I don’t always blarg about running…

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More work on the Project, more stumbling blocks, more throatpunches for the stumbling blocks.

I don’t pity Future Me when he comes back around to the words I got down today.  I went back and forth several times during the writing trying to decide whether I wanted the scene to be set in one place or another, whether or not I wanted a certain character to be present, whether whole swathes of exposition should be there at all… yeah, today’s draft is basically a thornbush of dubious dialogue and confusing directions to my Future Self.  “SOME TIME PASSES” and “PROBABLY GOING TO WANT TO CUT THIS” and “WHOOPS NEED TO DO THIS SOONER” are just a few of the notes scribbled in blood in the margins.  Okay, not scribbled in blood, but only because KEYBOARDS DON’T BLEED.  The id-writer had no patience today for sorting through things, and with good reason: I find myself mired in a scene that probably went on for too long.  It gives a lot of exposition which I feel is useful for me but not necessarily useful for any hypothetical reader; information that is probably better discovered scrawled on the cliff face as you hurtle downward past it toward the rocks.

Maybe that was a bit too stream-of-consciousness to make sense.  Can’t question it.  Today is a day for progress.

Anyway, I got the requisite 900 words (953 to be exact) but I’m not quite satisfied, so I will probably go back to it later.  In the meantime:

A post about running!

I don’t always blarg about running, because for the most part, there isn’t that much to say.  I mean, sure, every run is a good run, and every run is a revelation of the air in your lungs and the majesty of nature and the dodging of traffic and blah blah blah.  But you can only write about that so many times before it all sounds like so much whooshing in the ears.  So when I write about running, I try to have something specific to say.

My running has been in the ditch this year, and that could be more literal only if I had actually fallen into a ditch.  In January I suffered a horrific illness which kept me bedridden for days followed by a truly unpleasant foot injury (I snagged it on a nail in the back porch) which had me hobbling for weeks.  My wife would want me to point out why I was barefoot on the back porch in the dead of winter in the dark, and I would point out that every story needs a little mystery.  (I was peeing to save water vis-a-vis not flushing the toilet.  This made perfect sense to me at the time.  It was a weird month.)  GOLDFINGER IT.

So that was January, and in proper tolerate-no-weakness, progress-or-death fashion I went right back out and attempted to run way more than I should have as soon as the foot was even functional again.  Because I had to make up for lost time, right???  SO I INJURED IT AGAIN.  This time it’s a lot less obvious what the nature of the hurt is — something in the heel, probably a strain or a sprain or plantar fasciitis or I don’t know I’m not a fargoing podiatrist.

Whatever it is is (yes, “is is” is sometimes correct, holy Sharknado I just blew my mind by writing “is is” is and it was STILL correct) bad enough that I’ve scheduled a meeting with a podiatrist in two weeks.  I’ve been to the doctor’s office for my own discomfort exactly twice in my life (that I can recall.  And if I can’t recall it, it didn’t happen.  I think that sounds like a good rule).  Both times were for what eventually turned out to be kidney stones.  You know, only EXCRUCIATING AND BRAIN-CHOKING PAIN, the kind of pain that makes you wish you could literally disconnect your head from your body for a while to make the pain stop.

This pain is not that bad, but it’s gone on long enough that it’s time to acknowledge that there may be something actually wrong.

But here’s why I’m stupid.  (Really, I should be writing, here’s why I’m stupid IN THE HERE AND NOW OF THIS MOMENT TODAY.)  I am doing the classic guy thing: “naw, it’s fine, rub some dirt on it, no problem” in that I have started running again regardless.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not out there gritting my teeth and fighting back tears at every step.  In fact, when I run, the pain for the most part goes away.  It’s later in the day, after I’ve been sitting or walking around, you know, NOT RUNNING, that it starts to hurt.  So I have logicked for myself that it can’t be an issue of actual damage (elsewise it would surely hurt all the time, I mean, that makes SENSE, right?) and must therefore be something more like a strain (some muscle or other gets stretched out and relaxed during activity, then tightens up like a piano wire afterward).  This makes sense to my lizard brain and is how I’m justifying continuing to run.

We will see in a few weeks whether it’s actually fine or whether I’ve destroyed my feet beyond repair like Kathy Bates in Misery.  (Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth a little bit.)  So far it’s fine.  But therein lies the problem.  I convinced myself that it’s not so bad; that I can continue to run.

Let me detour to reiterate a fundamental truth that I believe to be true.  THERE IS SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN ABOUT RUNNERS.  Bear in mind, I’m talking about capital-R RUNNERS.  Ask the average person if they’d like to go out for a run, and they are likely to say anything from “No” to “Get bent” to nothing at all in favor of a speedy shin-kick.  Ask a Runner, however, and the answer will be something like “Hey, yeah, I could go for three or four or five miles, I mean I ran this morning but I could use a few more today, in fact why don’t I run from my house to yours so that I can make it an even 10?”  We are messed up, and I fully own belonging to that group.  Card-carrier.  Except we don’t have cards, we have dirty socks and worn-out shoes.

And yes, I’ve read the articles and some books and the studies that show that humans are basically custom-built to run long distances, and I buy most of it.  THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE THE BEHAVIOR.  What kind of an idiot convinces himself that he’s not really hurt so that he can engage in the activity which probably injured him in the first place — an activity, by the way, which is utilized as punishment in VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER SPORT.  It’s like that parasite that takes over an ant’s brain and forces it to camp out on a blade of grass for the sole purpose of getting eaten so that the parasite can end up in a cow’s digestive tract.  (This is a real thing, I read it on The Oatmeal.)  There’s some similar parasite that infects the brains of normal humans and causes them to think it’s a good idea to run for hours and hours and hours every week.  I’m convinced of it.

So I’m injured and finding ways to run despite the injury.  Such, it seems, is life.  I’m doing it smarter this time than I did back in February; taking nice short distances, going at what feels like a snail’s pace.  So far, it’s working, though it’s tortuous reigning myself in when my brain is constantly whispering go faster, go farther, you’re a wimp, GO GO GO.  But I’m determined to make a positive out of it, and here’s another thing I’ve convinced myself of.  While my physical self has suffered, my metaphysical self has grown. While my body is waning, my mind is waxing, and while my running has been pathetic of late, my writing has been prolific.  The trick will be to keep the two balanced as I (hopefully) bring my physical self back up to speed (oh no, the running puns are starting again, HIDE).  Hopefully there’s enough wax to go around.

+2 points for the continued metaphor, but -10 because… ew.

5 in the bag

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Getting my writing done in a crazy busy day like yesterday is a pretty significant accomplishment. Only 1100 words, but still ahead of schedule. More importantly, the siren’s call of laziness, sounding loudly by virtue of having filled my quota for the week before Friday even started, failed to pull me off course. So for my first week of the project, I met all my goals : 5 days of writing at 900 words a day, stayed on topic, even posted to the blog a few times.  The sweet, sweet smell of accomplishment. Smells like donuts. Is it donuts?

So now I get two days off. But percolating for the weekend is a Flash Fiction from Chuck Wendig. I am not sure yet if having little side projects will help or hinder the central project, but as long as the ideas keep coming, why not give it a spin?

There is also the issue of momentum ; I am saddled with fear that if I stop pushing, stop driving forward, that the tires will bog down in the mud and I will be discovered years from now, a dessicated skeleton lazily raising a cheeto to its mouth (the cheeto, I believe, would still be intact, crunchy, and delightful).

The same could be said for my running, which is currently in the ditch belching black smoke. A part of me fears that if I go too long without a run that I will never get back into it, so I keep pushing myself to get out there and in all likelihood I keep making my injury worse. But KEEP PUSHING OR ELSE YOU’LL BE FAT FOREVER so off I go and then a few hours later ohgodithurts.

Sharknado,  I just came a little close to psychoanalyzing myself. ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP RUN FOR YOUR LIVES THE ABYSS IS HERE.
Ahem. Next post should hopefully be a Flash Fiction about time thieves.

BTW, words that the tablet did not want to let me write in this post: belching, dessicated, cheeto, sharknado, virtue, psychoanalyzing, fat, abyss, bog. Predictive typing, my assignment (yep, it just made that “correction” too). It’s like it doesn’t know me at all.