The Time is Now!
Today I woke up before my 5:15am alarm but felt anything but rested. When I started writing this, it was just before sunrise and I could hear the rain pelting down outside. Soon I’d be outside in the dreck. It would have been so easy to just… not. But then again, what had all the hard work this season been for if I didn’t keep up the momentum I’d created for myself?
In a multi-day FKT, no matter how great your progress is, every day starts from “zero”. Whatever you did yesterday, well, guess what? You get to do it again! Consistency, consistency, consistency. I don’t want my past efforts to be in vain, so onward I go.
Those early morning fuzzy musings were about the best I could muster up in the moment. I’ve said some variation of the following a few ways in the past few months, but it keeps ringing more and more true: that there is no time like the present. Life is short, and life can change very quickly. I think I experienced a fair amount of denial when I went through a huge life change and moved to Boston. Even though I know it’s logically untrue, there’s this idea that life will just go back to the way it was. I’ll wake up one day and be back in Portland, see all my Oregon friends, go for a run in Forest Park, zip off to my coaching job in the afternoon. Which makes it very easy to look at my present life as temporary and think, “I’m too busy to do [X] now, but things will calm down eventually, I’ll do that later.”
But in reality, the last couple years have required some pretty abrupt adaptation, particularly with my workload in grad school. And I don’t yet know exactly what life will be like after grad school, so I can’t make any assumptions about how much time I’ll have to do things “later”. After feeling like I’d not prepared as well as I could have for the Colorado Trail FKT last summer, I’ve realized I need to adapt outside of school too. And besides running, I have quite a few house projects I’d like to do, and there are some personal things I’d like to give more attention to, including how I’m planning the next 5-10 years and what I’d like to build toward.
Over my spring break from school, I took advantage of the uninterrupted time I’d set aside for myself and ran 145 miles spread out over 6 days on trails. I spent a lot of time in my head, no headphones, no distractions. Spending that much time with my thoughts was pretty uncomfortable at first. It’s like, whenever I give myself that kind of space to think about whatever, the unpleasant stuff seems to get dredged up first, and I have to work through it (even though I’ve already worked through it countless times) before proceeding with a clearer mind. And well, spending hours and hours in my head with uninterrupted thoughts about pretty much everything over the course of nearly a week, I feel like I gained the clarity I was hoping for.
In the ten or so days since then, I’ve put some plans into action:
-I’m starting some house projects now instead of waiting until the summer. My summer is filling up, and if I keep waiting it’s never going to happen. One of them is sorting through the things in a room in my new home that has turned into the “junk room” (which I hate) containing all of my things that don’t yet have a place to go. I have pretty much zero free time, but I made an achievable goal of filling one box each week of things I definitely no longer want, that I will donate (and there’s a perfect place to bring donations right on my way to school, so not out of the way!). The other things I’ll sort into bins, which are empty and ready. It’s so much stuff to sort through, but filling one bin at a time is manageable.
-I’m taking steps and making appointments to take care of my personal health. Easy to put off, especially when living somewhere new without a care team already established.
-In May, I am going to attempt a self-supported record through the Virginia section of the Appalachian Trail, currently held by Heather Anderson, set in the midst of her record-breaking hike of the entire AT. It will be very tough, and I believe I can do it.
Above all, I would like my daily actions and choices to contribute to living a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. No reason to wait on that!
The top photo was taken by my cousin at the Isabella Gardner Museum while visiting me in Boston. Time with family is always time well spent!
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