Running

This song has nothing to do with anything except that I like running to it.

Did you know I'm turning 30 next month? If you didn't, it's because you don't live at my house. Because I talk about it a lot at my house.

I kept feeling like I wanted to do something "big" for my 30th birthday. I've never been a big birthday person and I always get depressed on my birthday which I think is so dumb, so I figured I should stave that off with...something this year. Some research yielded cute ideas like, passing out gifts to 30 strangers; doing 30 nice things for people; renting a roller rink for a night and skating to '80s music (my favorite idea which came from Phoebe, but in this roller-rink-scarce area it is cost prohibitive); running 30 races. Upon further reflection I found that I'm not up for making my "big" thing something extravagant or have the theme of "30," although I would like to do something meaningful. Whatever that ends up being, I don't know if I'll blog about it or not, but regardless I haven't thought of it yet.

In the meantime I did decide to run a couple of races this year. Sometimes doing something that's hard for me, and that I'm still not very good at even when I work at it, still makes me feel better about myself. Like, so what if I worked my tail off and still didn't impress anyone with the results: I impressed myself with the working-my-tail-off part. And those hard-fought endorphins come through for me...almost every time.

Once the whirlwind of the holidays was over, it became apparent that if I wasn't going to be taking antidepressants anymore, I needed something else to replace the effect. So I started running 5 days a week. I've been doing that for about 10 weeks now and am somehow not much stronger or faster. But I feel good about my efforts. My goal (put into words by Word of Wisdom Living): "Get at least 30 minutes of exercise, most days of the week. It's best if you sweat."

Still I wanted something to push me to go beyond that, so, ignoring all common sense, I signed up for a Ragnar relay, which I have found excuses not to do every year since I did it the first time, but I had no excuses this year. Then yesterday almost on a whim, I signed up for an obstacle course race with a friend. Then I signed up for Ida's preschool's fun run. And I'm still considering another obstacle course race later in the summer depending on how the first one goes. Four in a year might be my max unless we hire a nanny.

I'm no "Runner" but I'm pretty good at reaching goals if I'm motivated enough. So my daily goal this spring and summer is to follow a training schedule and improve my stamina. My overall goal until I retire from this "I'm 30 Now" running phase (whether the phase will remain beyond age 30 is to be determined), is to not embarrass my Ragnar team, which apparently came in 3rd place for their age group last year...an age group I will now qualify for, incidentally, since I'll be 30. Do you see where I went with that? Happy Thursday. May the endorphins be ever in your favor.