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.