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.