Borderline Happy

I have never really kept it a secret that I have battled struggles with mental health throughout my high school and collegiate running career.  At times, my mental health has been nothing more than background noise, buzzing around just loud enough to remind me that I am not one hundred percent "normal", and at other times, it has been the center of my universe, taking over my relationships and turning the already difficult task of staying relevant in the world of collegiate athletics into a feat that feels impossible to ask of anyone.
On October twenty-second last year, in the midst of an already struggling cross country season that saw me fighting to stay afloat and remember what my place out on the course was after an injury that shook my previously solid grasp of who I was as an athlete, I walked into what was meant to be a typical therapy session with my gal Monique, something I'd done roughly every two weeks since the previous November.  I (and most of y'all, because I am a chronic oversharer and I firmly believe that the topic of mental health needs to be addressed in the world of athletics again and again and again until it becomes completely comfortable for all parties involved) had known for some time that I had the Millenial Special, a combination of anxiety and depression that is becoming less taboo every day-I've joked with friends more than once that if you don't at least have depression, are you really that trendy?  So, thinking this day would be like any other, I basically just rolled out of bed, threw on some joggers and a sweater, and went to the CAPS center in the student union. 

We started out our one-hour appointment pretty normally, just chatting about the events that had transpired since last I saw her, and got to talking about how a race I’d just competed in didn’t go as I’d planned.  We touched briefly on how closely I tie my personal value to my ability to compete at a high level, and got somehow to the topic of the indicators of mental health issues that a family member was exhibiting.  There was a brief pause after I joked that I sometimes thought this person might have bipolar disorder, and she said, “Well...Have you ever considered that it might be borderline?  How much do you know about that disorder?”  After I told her I had a broad idea of what it was, she pulled out her copy of the diagnostic criteria from the DSM-5 and flipped to the page that contained the steps for diagnosing borderline.  Before starting to read through them, she looked up at me and said, “Try to think about if these criteria apply to (the family member)...and think about whether or not they apply to you.”  I felt like I couldn’t have quite heard her right.  Me?  Yeah, I’m a little bit wild sometimes, but people with borderline are certified Crazy B*tches, aren’t they?  Then she started reading the criteria.  “Impairments in self-functioning...impairments in interpersonal functioning...negative affectivity”.  Haha. Crap.  As she described what these phrases meant, I searched for a loophole and found nothing.  “Disinhibition...impulsivity...antagonism.”  I met the criteria at every step, and when she finished going through them, she looked at me and said, “It sounds like you meet the criteria for diagnosing borderline personality disorder.  But that’s not a death sentence.  Knowing that you have it, we can just attack the negative aspects of it and leave you with the positive side of this.” 

I walked out completely unsure of what to think.  Everything I’ve ever heard about borderline personality disorder has been entirely negative.  Women with this disorder are crazy, they’re hysterical, they’re overly emotional, they don’t know how to keep themselves in check. She said that it wasn't a death sentence, but in that moment, it sure felt like one. One of the diagnostic criteria for this disorder is "pathological personality traits", and that was a phrase that I couldn't seem to shake. Pathological? Like my personality was a disease?  I told my coach Sarah my diagnosis in a meeting an hour later, and she reminded me that people are not their diagnoses.  I felt like I should have been relieved by the knowledge that there is a name for what was happening to me, that I wasn't just losing my mind randomly, but I wasn't.  I wasn't relieved because borderline is still the type of disorder that has a very negative social stigma.  Because before I found out I had it, I still considered people with the diagnosis to be crazy and unable to be reasoned with.  Because even my therapist admitted that most people in her field strongly dislike working with borderline patients because they consider them to be largely unwilling to change and hard to reason with. Equipped with this diagnosis coupled with the attempt to come back from my spinal injury, my grasp of who I actually was seemed to be slipping, regardless of how hard I tried to dig my nails into it. Being diagnosed with a personality disorder comes with a whole slew of questions-How soon do I have to tell new romantic interests that they might be taking up with a crazy person? What made me this way? What does this mean for the way people perceive me? How much of my personality is actually me, and how much is some kind of disease? Gradually, I've come to be more comfortable with this diagnosis. Talking to Monique about it, getting my grubby little mitts on as much related literature as I can, and working through processes to deal with the uncomfortable side effects of having a ~pathological personality~ has made my life significantly better. The more I was willing to actually discuss this with my therapist, the more I realized that borderline is not something that has to be innately bad. In one conversation we had, she described borderline personality disorder as being like a very sensitive car alarm-Sometimes, it can be very useful, because it warns you the second someone is trying to break into your car (or ruin your life, break your heart, steal your cat, and burn your house down), and sometimes it's just inconvenient because it goes off if someone brushes it (or looks at you with an unusual expression, causing you to decide that they hate you and want you to burn in hell for eternity). Basically, the task that we are working on together now is to keep the positive borderline traits, like emotional highs and sensitivity to the emotions of others, while weeding out the negative things like emotional reactivity that can lead to explosive bursts of temper in response to triggers
, or depressive slumps
in response to the actions or emotions of those around me. Of course, it's still perfectly fine to get angry and sad sometimes, but the key with borderline is to recognize when reactions to certain stimuli are too extreme and keep them in check. Learning to deal with emotional triggers in a healthy and productive way makes having BPD something that can be viewed in a more positive light, because though it truly is a pain in the rear when you find yourself sitting on the floor crying because you thought you had more chocolate almond milk and you do not, in fact, have more chocolate almond milk, it can also be a very beautiful disorder (lmaoooooo what a weird thing to say) in that the intensity of emotions that you feel is heightened, so you get to enjoy the positive emotions much more than you would otherwise. Yes, the lows can be very low, but the highs are amazing and I can't imagine myself being any other way.
I have battled with mental illness throughout my collegiate career, and I have been truly lucky to have to support of family, friends, coaches and trainers, but while I’ve had this, some athletes do not, and the quickness to judge and lack of empathy from strangers and individuals with only pieces of the story can be astounding. Things such as people cracking jokes about one’s need for an ESA is one example of this-You would never think to laugh at an epileptic for having a seizure dog, so what is so funny about the concept of someone with a diagnosed disorder having a support animal to help comfort them? We need to reshape the way people, especially in the athletics community, view mental illness. Just because you can’t see a person’s suffering doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When someone doesn’t run well because they have a stress fracture, people are understanding and often sympathetic, but when someone doesn’t run well because some aspect of their mental health is suffering, they are often written off as having “made some bad choices” or not put enough effort into their training. In the book What Made Mady Run, the author talks about how mental illness is sometimes like anemia-Because it’s not something that you can see on a scan or put a brace on, people tend to see it as a deficiency of character, rather than an ailment that someone is working hard to overcome.
The reality is, we all need to sit down and chat about mental health. We need to make it acceptable for anyone to say “I need help” and to say that they are struggling without judgments about their character being passed. People are people, and a lack of serotonin doesn’t make anyone mentally “weak” or incapable of being an incredible athlete and human being.

Lil Chicken Legs

This Wednesday on my four mile morning double, I got to reminiscing on the days when that was it.  That was my run for the day.  There was no eight mile session on the underwater treadmill waiting for me later, and there was certainly no rehab with the athletic trainer.  On a good day, if my high school coaches bribed me with donuts, I might just be persuaded to stick around and do five minutes of core.  And it made me feel like such a badass.  Four miles a day?  Thirty miles a week?  She's a whole fitness queen.  When I got excused from class for the day due to a track meet and teachers would ask me how far I ran, my entire scrawny little fourteen-year-old body would positively glow with pride while telling them I was going to compete in the two mile and the mile this weekend.  My coaches introduced me pretty early on to the idea that if I could get my lanky self around that four hundred meter oval fast enough, I might just luck out and get a college education out of the deal.  Then my older teammates started running for universities and informed me that most collegiates ran eight to ten miles every day, and let me tell you, I was shook to my core.  Eight to ten miles a day?  At seven minute pace?  Not for me, thanks.  Freshman year of high school, the worst fear I had for my running career was shin splints, and on days when I forgot to pack my Nikes for practice, I would jog it out in my Puma fashion sneakers.  I remember thinking that I could for sure make it in college off of thirty miles a week and natural talent because sixty miles a week was definitely too much to ask of any human body.  Of course, to be fair, at that point in time I was still an angsty little barely-teen who would run a mile to Starbucks and split a vanilla bean Frappuccino with my friend Sarah or find a park to swing at on easy days, and my mindset towards running would be changed significantly over the next seven years.

Over the last year, I think to some extent, my mindset went too far in the other direction.  After my injury, I worried that I couldn't possibly be doing enough to stay fit, and when I raced in the USU uniform again for the first time, it was like the confirmation that my anxious brain had been looking for.  Ah-ha!  It seemed to say to me.  See, I told you!  You really screwed up your training with this nonsense!  Now you've gone and let down your team and your coaches and the entire running community thinks you're a has-been!  The rest of the season, that little goblin crouched in my brain.  Idiot, why would you think you're ready for this? would be smothered under false bravado, but the second it started to hurt during a race, my brain would bail on the whole project and leave my hurting body all on its own to deal with the next four kilometers.  Rude.  People often talk about getting through injuries and the months of cross training, but I was in no way prepared for getting through post-injury when your body is fit and fine, and your brain has forgotten that it's allowed to be on board with this whole running thing, even though it hurt you once.  Silly brain, running isn't your ex-boyfriend and it's not going to forget your Christmas present or hit on your mother.  This mindset hopped back on as soon as I raced the first time indoor.  My performance in the 3k at the first UW meet was far from special-My first few weeks back training with the team after winter break were a little iffy due to quad tendinitis, so I got dropped and dropped hard in my very first indoor race since the 2017 season.  Yikes.  After what was deemed a not-even-mediocre performance at indoor conference that saw me run 17:45 for a 5k (BIG yikes!!!), my coaches and main gal Monique talked me into seeing a sports psychologist again because clearly my body is doing fine now, my brain is just being a huge a-hole.  So, I paid a visit to Tammie before my outdoor season opener, and was instructed to pay attention to the mean stuff my brain was saying to me while I was running, then to write a love letter to my athlete self to read before and after my next race, and pick a "broken record" statement to repeat nonstop during my race every time my brain goblin tried to come knocking and inform me I was a has-been at the ripe old age of twenty-one.  16:32.85 is not a particularly significant 5k time-It won't even get me into the first rounds of the NCAAs.  But what it represents is so much more than a decent 5k time for a collegiate.  It represents the first time since I got a call during a cross training workout at the student gym here at USU informing me that I needed to come to the training room ASAP to discuss the results of the MRI on my back that I felt remotely like me.  Racing was still scary, but the mantra of "tough b****" drowned out the scary this time.  No, this race wasn't sensational.  There was no surprise sixty-second personal best, but there was a very solid start to a season, and close to a PR for my season opener, which feels pretty good after a twelve month hiatus from feeling good, or even okay, about my running.

So, with my crazy brain in mind this week, I've been paying more attention to the things I tell myself when I'm out running.  This Wednesday, at one point in time during that morning run, two college-aged guys in jogger sweatpants and bandanas gave me the ol' eyeball up-and-down, then proceded to start their run on the sidewalk in front of me.  Lordisa almighty, give me the strength of mind and body that I suddenly find when some crusty looks me up and down then tries to school me in my own domain.  Sis, I absolutely jetted out of there, and had a spring in my step for my final two miles that seems to be borne specifically to show up the boys.  And boy oh boy, did that mindset take me back to the days when I was seven years old and would jog two miles in jeans and converse with my hair down loose and tangled up because I couldn't be bothered to put it in a ponytail for anybody.  The days when I was a little chicken-legged eight year old kicking down all of the high school boys that I could at the local Fourth of July fun run 5k because my mom always promised me a dollar for every boy that I beat, and my boobs were (if you can believe it) smaller than they are now, but I would beg my older sister to let me race in her sports bra anyway because it made me feel like a Badass Strong Woman Warrior.  Heaven knows that child had no fear, and on that Wednesday run, I couldn't stop thinking to myself, "Well, mama always says when you go home that you still look just like her messy-haired wild child kindergartener.  Time to act like it, chicken legs.  Don't tell me you lost your spunk when you got a little bit of a butt."  So, when people ask me what my goals are this season, do yourselves a favor and don't ask me what time or place I'd like to run.  I have not the slightest clue what numbers this season is going to hold.  I just want to run with the attitude of elementary school Lys-She would be so mad if she could see the way my brain has let me ignore the fitness I have now in favor of being afraid of running fast, so for her sake, I'm going to start channeling that spirit again.         

Up For Adoption: One Fully Grown Adult Woman

With the beginning of this semester came a terrifying realization:  I am only three semesters away from graduating, which means I should already be doing things like applying to graduate programs, taking the GRE, and looking into potential jobs for after I graduate.  Have I done any of these things?  Absolutely not.  Well, kind of.  I did go to schedule a date to take the GRE.  I had one all picked out for this April in a testing center here in Logan, then I got to the checkout page where I learned that it apparently costs two hundred dollars to take it, at which point I laughed aloud, audibly said, "Nope.  Nope.  Absolutely not.", and exited out of the browser to continue watching Grey's Anatomy through for the second time.  This girl is Ready For the Real World.  Please adopt me so I don't have to do anything real with my life.  Tragically, I realize that I do have to do all of those adult things and more if I want to be accepted into any PhD programs for clinical psychology, but for the month of January at least, I'm content to just focus on actually passing my classes and racing track again for the first time since 2017 and maintaining my sanity while working, volunteering in a lab on campus, training, and attempting to not fail any classes.  Pray for me for real this time.

I am still not sure yet when I'll be opening up my indoor season this year.  I am meeting with my coaches on Tuesday and we might come to a decision then, but we also might remain completely clueless.  We have run our first few workouts over the last few weeks, and my legs and lungs were aghast to say the least at my nerve in deciding to run another track workout after so long away.  To be fair to them, it was pretty rude of my to just start running track paces again without warning them in advance, but then again, if my body hadn't decided to up and break a vertebral pedicle, we wouldn't have been in this predicament in the first place.  I finally got to start doing workouts in the USU indoor training facility, which I've loved.  Rather than an indoor track, we have an indoor turf field that the coaches set up cones on to form a two hundred meter circle.  It's nice because the turns are much gentler than the harsh flat, oval track we trained on at MSU so I finish workouts with less strain on my IT bands and knees.  Additionally, with the workouts being run on turf, I imagine it will feel much easier to run faster times on a track where less energy is absorbed by a soft surface.  This season, I'm hoping to focus exclusively on racing the 5k indoors and the 10k outdoor, with possibly an occasionally 3k indoor and 5k outdoor as a way to shake out and mentally prep for the longer races.  My attitude has definitely been much more laid back and less neurotic than it has been since I entered college-There is no longer the constant gripping compulsion or idea that I have to do certain things and run certain times,  but the feeling that I should just run to see what I can do.  This idea was born of necessity, as I felt extremely near to burnout several times through the last cross country season and the emotional devastation that came with it, and in the following weeks while I was on winter break and away from the obligations of team practice.  Healthy mindset?  Never met her.  It's learning.

While I'm scampering all over the country for races this year, I will continue to work at the eating disorder RTC I started employment at in July.  I will also be taking most of my classes online this semester.  Psychology of gender, advanced analysis of behavior, and biomechanics will all be done online this year so I can hopefully avoid falling behind and missing tons of class time.  My only classes in person this semester are exercise physiology and yoga.  I am fully confident that yoga is either going to transform me into someone who is zen, patient, calm, and flexible, or frustrate me to the point that I hurl my yoga mat into the full-length mirrors in the studio and have a complete mental breakdown before being committed to a psych ward.  I'll keep you guys posted on which it ends up being.  Hopefully the breathing techniques will make me a better person and prevent it from being the latter. 

Love Hurts

According to the date stamp on my last post, I haven't written or published an update in almost exactly three months, since September twelfth.  Just scrolling through my photos, one could see that a lot happened in those three months.  I made my return from injury and redshirt running to racing in the USU jersey again, one of my friends and I dyed our hair blue, I rediscover Only Time by Enya and played it at least three hundred times, I got Tiny Hand (a tiny hand finger puppet that comes on all of my trips now because I find it to be indescribably funny), I started working in a psychology lab on campus, my friends and I became heroin drug mules (just kidding mom, for real none of us traffic drugs), and I went from having a ferritin level of twenty-three to one of seventy-six.  Truly iconic.  Still, though, well all of this was going on, I had no desire to update my blog with anything that was going on because I kept waiting to have a good race that I could talk about.  I only raced four times this season, and up until the very last race I kept telling myself the next one would be the one.  Paul Short didn't go as I'd hoped, but I figured it was a good way to ease back into competing as a team and racing in such a large field.  Then pre-nationals didn't go well either and I told myself that I was just tired from the workouts we'd been doing.  Then conference didn't go well and I didn't quite know what to think anymore, I just hoped that regionals would be okay and that my collegiate cross country career wouldn't have to end like this.  Then it did.  Initially, after the season ended, I kept looking for what, exactly, had gone wrong.  Was it that one week over the summer that I got sick and had to lower my mileage?  Was it that I didn't run my long runs far enough this year?  Was it that I decided to do seventy miles a week during season instead of eighty?  It took a few weeks to realize that there wasn't necessarily anything that had gone catastrophically wrong, but maybe just some things that had been draining my energy through the season and some difficulty transitioning back to the mental aspect of competing after having been injured.

Before my back injury, I was frankly a narcissist every time I lined up to race.  I was confident in the fact that I was good, and I knew that what I was about to do was going to hurt and hurt a lot, but I was ready for that.  After such a long break from structured workouts and competition, I didn't quite seem to remember that it was going to hurt.  I went into the first race of the season with the confidence that I would do well, but then when it started to hurt, there were a lot of "what ifs".  What if I'm not fully back from my injury?  What if we don't win this race?  What if I didn't do enough this summer?  What if my diet isn't good enough?  What if my mental health struggles make it so I can't get a contract after college, even if I hit the times for it?  Over the season, all of those question marks weighed down on me until I reached the regional meet agitated and exhausted, putting all of the physical and mental energy I had into a finish that didn't even make all-region, when last year I had managed all-American.  After spending the first weeks after the official end of my collegiate cross country career digging into what possibly could have happened, I finally accepted that I might never have a concrete answer, and that's okay.  I can never get that season of competition back, and it makes no sense for me to throw away the two years I have left in track over it when I can start fresh training for the indoor track season now.

Something that I discussed with my wonderful therapist, Monique, immediately after the season was whether or not I even wanted to continue running.  If you've never experienced the huge ups and downs of running, this might not make sense to you, and questioning my desire to keep running didn't make sense to me either, but at the same time, it made all of the sense in the world.  Running has been the center of my life since my freshman year of high school.  That's a full seven years of balancing school and social life around early morning workouts, of telling people you can't come to there get-together to catch up this weekend because you'll be at a meet, of perpetually being tired and just sort of accepting and embracing that exhaustion.  It's also seven years with some of the best people you could possibly have the opportunity to know, of working with coaches who want to help you be a better human being and a better athlete, of traveling to some seriously amazing places and competing with people who push you to your absolute limits, of the thrill of discovering how much your body is capable of.  Running is the great love of my life, but like any love, it breaks my heart in a big way.  So at the end of this season, after I felt like I had poured everything I had to give into running and it gave me nothing at all in return, her questioning whether or not I even wanted to continue felt entirely valid, and I didn't immediately say yes.  After thinking for a few minutes, I said I wanted to keep running.  She asked if I would still feel that way if someone could look into the future and tell me that I would not get the results I wanted, and my answer was still yes.  Because at this point, I feel that I deserve to see for myself.  After all of the energy I have put into my running career, and all of the love I still have for running, I owe it to myself to see just how much I am capable of.

With that in mind, she and I set about structuring a new way for me to look at my running so it's not so devastating to get disappointing results.  For the upcoming track season, rather than thinking in terms of have-to, such as "I have to be All-American" or "I have to run --:-- in the 5k this season", I'm working on thinking of my training and competing in terms of cans.  What can I do today?  What can I accomplish this season if I take care of myself, remain consistent, and just run to see how far I can go with my career?  Running is so much more enjoyable without the pressure of the have-to attitude that I put on myself.  Looking forward to winter break, I'm planning on getting back up to eighty mile weeks before the beginning of outdoor season and I am once again hyped.  Prayers and snacks still not only accepted, but welcomed.

When I Say "Send It", You Say "For the Boys"

Hey guys, it's me, ya girl.  I don't know why I even apologize for the large gaps between posts anymore as if I don't know for a fact it will probably happen again immediately.  I am sorry, but it will almost certainly happen again because the second I face any minor inconvenience, I refuse to do anything I am not required to do outside of school, running, work, and sleep.  That may be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one.  Some quick updates since it's been such a long time since I last posted:

-I started a new job in mid-July working at an RTC for disorder eating here in Logan.  I love it.  It's dope.  We get to do so much fun stuff with the clients there, and there are three cats there, so obviously it's an ideal workplace.

-I got a super h*ckin' cute dog, an Australian shepherd by the name of Atticus Sugar Perkins-Snyder.  We had a whirlwind relationship, and he is currently living with my parents in Coalville.  I don't think I am ever going to get him back, because my mother has fallen in love with him in a big way.  Ask me the story behind how I got him and how he ended up living with my parents sometime if you feel like it, because it's a funny one.

-My last ever (sad face) cross country camp was amazing and involved a cat named Dani DeVito, a salt lick, a banana suit, a naked mile (Am I joking about that?  I'll just let you all wonder.), pranks on the coaches, a full hour of skits putting Artie on blast, and a group of loose cows in the backyard.  The running part was cool too, I guess.  (Just kidding, the running part was great).

My camp child, Dani DeVito

-School right now is testing my patience in a big way.  I am still determined to get a 4.0 GPA this semester, but the lord is testing my resolve because several of the classes I am in this semester are freshman-level courses that I'm required to take to fulfill requirements for my recently added psychology major.  I know I still have to go to the classes, but it causes me physical pain to be in a class where we spend a full hour going over how to write a paper in APA formatting.  Sometimes it be like that, though.  All jokes aside, I do really enjoy some of my classes this semester.  Social psychology especially has been neat, as I am a snoopy overinvolved gossip and it is the study of how humans influence one another.  

Run hard, recover harder

Some unfortunate news-I found out that my ferritin is low (blood-iron levels, for those of you all who aren't majoring in a health-related field).  I know, we are all shocked that after going pescatarian for six months and eating absolutely no red meat my iron levels are low.  But the good news is, we caught it early on, right after my levels dipped below the "normal" level, so I'm on a supplement for it now and back eating red meat.

Live footage of me going in to get my blood tested.  Was not as excited as Hannah was.

Onto the running portion of my life, I can't tell y'all how weird running has been lately.  I've decided to stay at seventy miles a week for cross season this year to avoid burnout, and it's been a bit of a challenge arguing with my brain goblin that seventy really is sufficient, and that I don't need to do eighty to be successful in the season.  I still intend to start doing eighty after cross season to prepare for the 10k, but for cross season, my coaches and I have agreed that seventy is just fine, and that it might even be better to help me get to the end of the season still feeling fresh.  The "weird" isn't necessarily bad weird, though, it's just taking me some time to adjust the idea that you don't have to hammer every run and run more miles than anyone in the NCAA to be good at what you do.  

Some good news without any "weird" tacked on is that, for the first time post-injury, I've been doing full workouts with the team, and will be competing out of redshirt for the cross country season.  I typed that pretty calmly, but the reality is that I feel anything but calm about it.  I love this team so much, and I genuinely cannot wait to be lined up to race with them again.  As for when exactly I will be opening up my competitive season, that is a secret for now. ;)

The Trinity is ready 4 the season, folks.

Also, if you thought last year was a breakout season for USUXC, you'd best buckle up for this year.  Coming into the season, we are already ranked top ten in the nation, and we plan to live up to those rankings and more.  Keep your eye out for the Aggies this weekend at the BYU invitational.  We've got a very strong group returning, and some new faces that I think will shock some people with how talented they are.

Don't Be a Bummer, Babe

Four score and seven years ago, I wrote my most recent blog post.  I think the first step in anything is admitting that you have a problem, so this is me admitting that I have a problem with staying consistent with my posts anytime I have finals, start a new job, decide that my nails are too long and the clicking sound of them on my keyboard is annoying, or get mildly inconvenienced in any way at all, so I apologize for that.  I'm buying a new planner this week, since my old one is all used up (Sorry not sorry that buying new planners is honestly one of the best things that ever happens to me, I just can't function without my old-fashioned paper planner telling me what to do every hour of the day.  Honest to goodness, we had team practice at three pm every day during the last school year, and you know what was still in my planner just in case I developed spontaneous and rapid-progressing Alzheimer's at two pm on a weekday?  "Practice, three pm), so hopefully I can shame myself into more consistency by penciling in blogging once a week.

"What have you been doing that takes up so much time that you couldn't spend thirty minutes updating us so we didn't all think you died or had converted to some religious practice that doesn't believe in the use of computers because it teaches that technology all comes from aliens?", you ask?  Well fellas, allow me to update you.

This summer, I started the first job that I have ever really felt fulfilled at.  I work at a residential treatment center in Brigham City, about thirty minutes from Logan, where I decided to stay for the summer to run and have better access to treatment and teammates to run with.  For those of you wondering what on earth residential treatment is, it is essentially a rehabilitation center.  The center I work in is a home that works specifically with boys aged fourteen to eighteen who live there twenty-four hours a day until their treatment is completed or they are pulled from the program.  They attend school there, and meet with therapists on-site for group or individual therapy.  My official job title is "Mentor", and my role in the house is basically to hang out with the boys all day.  I am there to first and foremost make sure they are safe and supervised, but more so to help them establish healthy connections, learn how to communicate their feelings effectively, feel as though they have people in their lives who genuinely care for them, and guide them through difficult experiences or uncomfortable encounters.  I started there just over a month, and I already love the boys in the house a crazy amount.  It's honestly like I suddenly have twenty-five rowdy, sensitive, fun, caring, sometimes obnoxious teenage sons-I always call them my Catalyst babies outside of work.  These boys are amazing.  Even during the most difficult shifts with them, I learn something new, and their capacity to listen to viewpoints they don't agree with and be open-minded to new ideas is more than they even realize.  They also keep me laughing, which is what gets us all through the rough days.  Somehow, they manage to simultaneously make me want to adopt or foster a child immediately and never ever ever ever ever have children.  The feeling that I make a difference for even one of these boys, though, has given me so much joy that I feel for the first time that I've discovered a career that I feel content allowing to define me outside of my running.  All of our boys have their own difficulties to work through, and whenever one of my boys feels comfortable opening up to me or even just being willing to take a walk and listen to options when he's upset is one of the most rewarding things I've ever experienced.  For every moment that is emotionally exhausting and you just want to throw in the towel and apply for an easier job, there are moments that make it all worth it-Last night's moment was when three of the boys were goofing off and refused to stay in bed until they were all tucked in and sang lullabies.  Other times, it's the out-of-the-blue quotes from the boys that mentors share at the end of the shift that bring us all to tears with how amusing they are-Like a boy who walked up to me during the middle of one of his classes, applying chapstick like a young girl putting on her mother's lipstick for the first time to say, "Lys, I have to keep my lips as smooth as a baby's butt.  I look way more attractive that way."  

Beyond the interactions with the boys, there are countless other enjoyable aspects of my job.  On rec days, we get to go cliff jumping, mountain biking, hiking, skating, and trail running with the boys, among other things.  We also watch movies with them, cook with them, play games, and do morning workouts together.  Most of the time, we are just there to hang out with them and do whatever it is they are doing at the time.  For this summer, my job has been my life and I'm loving it.
Running-wise, I think this may just be the healthiest summer I have had since starting my running journey freshman year of high school. There is still a lot of internal conflict when I go for a run without a gps and just go by time and feel, but I'm learning to be comfortable with doing what is best for my body and trust that doing so will be better for my career in the long run.  Also, I've learned to take days off when I'm sick or cut mileage for cross training when I need to.  I had some kind of viral infection my first few weeks of work because TBH working at Catalyst is kind of similar to working on the Mayflower with plague rats running loose-once an infection gets into the house, you're absolutely not going to avoid catching it.  My immune system has taken a beating on this job-but I actually took a day off to recover when the infection clung on for over a week. Honestly, who is she? Staying in Logan for the summer has been great for my running, because I actually get to meet up with teammates and see trainers (ILY Sonia) when I feel like I'm on the verge of losing my mind to running and becoming a nut case who lives alone in the mountains living off of tofu and mileage.  It's also given me a chance to branch out and meet new people outside of the running world.  I love love love my teammates, of course, but I also believe strongly that it's  healthy to have people in your life with no connection to running to keep you grounded.
Brace yourselves for more updates on Catalyst adventures, because lord knows this job provides me with stories for days.

*If you didn't catch the reference in the title, Lana Del Ray has a song that absolutely vibes called Summer Bummer.

Call Me Louie Zamperini

Get it?  Because I'm "unbroken"?  Because my back is officially completely healed?  It's fine if you didn't laugh, because I definitely did.
Guys.  It has officially been five months since I received the diagnosis that I had little cracks trying to form in my L5 vertebrae.  FIVE MONTHS.  In that time, I have learned more about respecting your limits, listening to your body, patience (barf), and perseverance than I realized my little walnut goblin brain was capable of.  I discovered that it's possible to be excited at the possibility of being allowed to run two miles at 8:30 pace under extreme supervision on a treadmill if it means you're able to run again.  When all is said and done, I am grateful beyond words for Margaret and Gerald (Okay, so I named the pedicles of my L5 vertebrae, so what?  I had a lot of time on my hands.  Too much time, probably.) giving out on me, because this experience gave me back the joy and love for running that I felt I was losing my grip of.  Every day that I'm allowed to run now, regardless of how tired I am or how much easier it would be to stay in bed and watch Grey's Anatomy, I am endlessly happy for.  I have done four workouts now (!!!) and each time I'm allowed to run another interval, I feel as though I've won the lottery.  It's weird.  If I was someone else observing, I wouldn't trust me.  No one should be that excited about running a 400m interval, yet there I am.
Even more exciting than the fact that I'm working out again...I'm RACING again! (!!!!!!)  USU hosted their only home meet of the year this last weekend, and The Man himself, Artie Gulden, cleared me to race it.  What's more, he really spoiled me and let me run 5:25 pace.  It felt bizarre racing again.  The last time I raced was at cross country nationals, and my withered asthmatic lungs weren't 100% convinced they would remember what to do.  Fortunately for my psyche, Nicki Minaj dropped a new song for me to listen to pre-race, otherwise I could've been in some real trouble.  I'm extremely glad my first race back was at my home track, because it allowed me to compete with the support of my teammates, friends, and family.  All in all, it was a v solid first race post-injury.  The first 2.6 miles felt like I had never left.  It's amazing how quickly your body remembers how to settle back in and tempo.  The last eight hundred meters were a little rough.  Here's how the conversation went between my lungs and my brain when I tried to pick up the pace:
Lungs:  Hey, you remember the last time you did a workout that would justify you trying to run at this pace?
Brain:  Yeah lungs!  It was just this last Tuesday!  And it was so fun!
Lungs:  Okay but when was the last time before that?
Brain:  ...Before nationals?
Lungs:  Yep.  You and legs are being pretty rude right now and you know it.
Then my lungs bailed on the operation without permission from brain and legs, which was inconsiderate, but I'm not bitter about it.  With altitude conversion, I actually ran a PR for the open 5k, which is pretty embarrassing for Past Lyssa.  (I've run faster 5ks back to back in the 10k than I have in the open, don't @ me.)

I'll be racing the 5k next weekend as well at BYU's Robison Invitational, after which my coaches and I will be making a decision and I may or may not have an exciting announcement.  Stay tuned.