Author: erintothemax

Hi, my name is Erin and I like to blog.

The Marathon Where I Let Go And Had The Time Of My Life

On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

I ran the Marine Corps Marathon over the weekend. It was my fourteenth marathon completed. I am incredibly proud of this one. It represents an evolution in my hobby-level distance running career. This marathon was grounded, joyful, and while I wouldn’t say it was effortless, it was light. Airy, even. Don’t believe me? This is me somewhere around mile giganti-thousand:

I am extremely attentive to my running. For several years I’ve kept a daily running journal in which I track my time and pace. As I’ve rolled deeper into my forties I’ve started to pay more attention to things I used to ignore, namely what I’ll call The Big S’es: Strength Training, Stability Work, Stretching, and Sleep. There is no question, I’m a better runner now than when I started. Whereas injuries used to be a constant battle, I barely ever get them now. My body is in better shape.

But earlier this year, I started to slow down. A lot. Inexplicably.

It wasn’t like I lost energy. Rather, what felt like the same effort became a minute to a minute and a half slower per mile. Pretty insane, actually.

Through a routine health care appointment this summer that had nothing to do with running, I discovered that my iron levels have plummeted. My doctor put me on iron pills. I’ve also been working on an iron-heavier diet. Pretty quickly my usual pace came back. For most runs. But I’m not totally back to normal yet, and still figuring it out.

So I truly had no idea what would happen at the Marine Corps Marathon this year. In my natural state my body likes to do a marathon in about 4:10 (I’ve clocked this or something within a minute or two of it several times). Every now and then I bust out something faster. Sometimes I fall the hell apart and go much slower.

Surrendering any pretense of a time goal/prediction was freeing!

I’m especially proud of this marathon for two other reasons:

First, two years ago I ran the first 18 miles of the Marine Corps Marathon and dropped out. This is the only marathon I haven’t finished to date. That was devastating for me, which I wrote about here. I’m thrilled to have finished this time around, but also for every stride before I finished. I did not fall into the headspace of ‘doom,’ ‘sad,’ ‘revenge’ self-punishment whatever. This weekend’s success proved to me that trying again is a worthy pursuit.

Second, I have finally figured out fueling. Remember my Big S’es from before? Fueling should have been on the list. Maybe fueling is even more important than the physical stuff. This training cycle I realized that I needed to stop grinding it out, and just eat a hell of a lot more when I’m running. It worked. I never got tired. I never walked. Score one for a training run this summer that I decided to cut short and label a failure (which I had never done). That became the impetus for me to really experiment with fueling. Win!

I will never be a professional runner. I’m getting older and, with the input of funky blood, slower.

But I love this sport. I learn things from it every day. I am thinking so much about fueling and failure and patience. Consistent effort. Letting go of outcomes. How I can apply it to other areas of my life. And find more joy!

    This Is A Lola Young Appreciation Post

    On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

    Fam, I’m going to keep this short, but I’m a huge Lola Young fan. She’s a wickedly talented artist. For the past year her music has been the soundtrack of me writing my thesis novel about an unlikeable woman experiencing domestic violence. I’ve listened to her song “Messy” on repeat until I’ve cried (and I love that she gets beaucoup royalties for this, please take all my money, girl)!

    She is open about having experienced a variety of mental health and substance issues. A few days ago, she collapsed on stage at a music festival. She has since said that she is taking a break and will “cancel everything for the foreseeable future.”

    I already loved the crap out of her. Now it is only more. People dealing with their demons, period, much less in public, get ALL of my praise. Everyone has demons. Everyone, dude. But only some are brave enough to admit they have them.

    Do what you need to do to be well, girl! We love you.

    This is a Lola Young appreciation post.

    Failure, The Great Teacher

    On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

    I ran my first marathon in February 2019, and have run 13 total since. In all of these training cycles, I have never not finished a training run. (Though I did drop out of one marathon race because I was going slow and my daughter had somewhere to be, which I wrote about here. That made me freak the freak out.)

    But yesterday I did a new thing. I stopped my 20 mile training run at 17.66 miles.

    I have finished absurd runs under all manner of absurd circumstances. Driving rain, with motorists pulling over to see if I need a ride? I’ll keep going, thanks. Upchuck in my mouth because of dietary decisions that, in hindsight, were rather obviously not compatible with running (dinner as four slices of jalapeno pizza with jalapeno poppers on the side, and beer, the night before)? Finished the damn run.

    But yesterday I bonked. This is a phrase that means, “run out of energy.” I have certainly bonked before. What I have not done is stop a run because I bonked. Instead, I drag myself. It’s torture but I know how to finish when this happens.

    But yesterday I didn’t do that. I just stopped. It was about to become 80 degrees, and climb another five or six, and I didn’t want to mess with that. Not after 17.66 miles of sweating in the sun.

    There was a mental chaos, a psychiatric falling through gravity that resulted from this rather unprecedented decision. I always finish my runs. What happens if I don’t finish my run?

    Turns out? Nothing.

    Except that I feel like a better runner today than I did yesterday. I learned something profound:

    I need to fuel myself more. I’d already known this, but turns out what I was telling myself was “more” was not enough.

    Additionally, if it’s hot out, I’m better off switching to treadmill, or rescheduling. Period.

    This is a life lesson indeed, to invest in myself more than I think I need to, and to take external conditions at least as seriously as I take my goals.

    Yesterday’s training run taught me more than so many others where I have bonked and kept going. I know how to perform superhuman. What I didn’t know was if I could accept a failure and learn.

    Turns out I can.

    And feel great!

    In Praise Of The Elderly White Hippies

    On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

    Following the Trump takeover of Washington, D.C., my regular morning runs have become an inventory of the missing unhoused people, gone from their usual places.

    She’s gone. She was by the Washington Monument.

    He’s gone. He sat in a wheelchair, by the Metro.

    Gone, gone, gone. So many gone. Have they been shipped to El Salvador? Sudan? Louisiana? They have committed no crime, no crime but homelessness. Poverty. Mental illness. In no true reading of a law book are these actually crimes. They simply have nowhere else to go.

    Until the troops came. God, the troops are so young. I see them on my runs, early in the morning. I study their faces. Do they know what this country was, not so long ago? A democracy. An imperfect democracy where you could work on making it more of a democracy.

    So this is the context in which White House hatelord Stephen Miller sneered at pro-democracy protesters shouting down his press conference as “elderly hippies,” “stupid white hippies,” who “all need to go home and take a nap because they’re over 90 years old.”

    My dear elderly white hippies, please keep it going. We love you so much. Take all the naps you need, friends. We all should. This will be a long fight and we’re best served by people willing to take care of themselves and fight to the end.

    And if you think calling us names is going to make us go away? You’re wrong.

    Zero Hour: Colonoscopy

    On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

    “She was tired of being embarrassed by the things her body did or did not do without her conscious input in the decision.” – emily m. danforth, “Plain Bad Heroines”

    I wake up at 5 a.m. to mix the drink. I sit in the partial dark, drinking Suflave with a straw. A new timer goes off each 15 minutes, telling me to do it again. My stomach rumbles. Oh, how it rumbles.

    Today is my first colonoscopy. Yes, I am sharing the story before it is complete. But I also believe that this piece of the experience — the prep, the intentionally making yourself sick — is the one that people are most afraid of. Including myself.

    Could it be that most of our irrational fears begin in childhood? My intense fear of vomiting started in preschool. Mind you, I didn’t vomit myself. But I was wearing a snappy blue sweatsuit with satin planets sewn on. It was my favorite sweatsuit.

    A girl named [REDACTED, IT’S SUCH A UNIQUE NAME THAT I WOULD DIE IF YOU RECOGNIZED YOURSELF HERE] and I were walking alongside the plastic bins that tame the beads and Duplos and shit. These were the final moments of my beloved sweatsuit. I believed it to be irreplaceable. That said, it probably came from J.C. Penney. I was neither in a position to understand this, nor to take myself shopping. To appreciate the fleeting and cyclical nature of possessions was above my skillset. This is fine. I was young. So young.

    In a moment I believed to be without warning, [REDACTED] proceeded to vomit all over me.

    This was the moment when my fear of throwing up locked in. I don’t know how to explain it, but I loved my sweatsuit with the satin planets. It was simultaneously comfortable, practical, and jazzy. And my sweatsuit with the satin planets was ruined.

    Also ruined? My previously implicit trust in the orderly.

    Whatever its origin story, my fear of the unruly gastrointestinal is not particularly unique, I guess. No one really likes acid out the front or a mess out the back. It doesn’t feel good, and it is a physical manifestation of how out of our control our bodies actually are.

    I write, as I wait for burbling abdomen to take over.

    This morning is my second round of prep. I did one last night. The truth is, it went fine. My flashbacks to the cloying gestational diabetes test drink from pregnancy were not instructive: I have not had difficulty choking the colonoscopy prep solution down. Nor has the inevitable result been nearly as dramatic as suggested by other people with anxiety on the internet.

    Now that I have hurdled the fence of my initial resistance, I’m casting my net wider, to the societal level. Why such a taboo about our bodies, and this colonoscopy test in particular? Literally everyone has a body that acts more or less the same way. I am not advocating for the crass. But who does it serve, when we are made to fear and loathe the normal and natural?

    A crappy day or two is nothing, compared to cancer prevention.

    I’m Writing A Novel, For Real This Time

    On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

    In my twenties, I quit my job several times to write a novel. The premise was: working was incompatible with writing a novel.

    This assumption of needing to stop everything to write a novel is especially hilarious now. Fast forward to 45, when I’m writing a novel, for real this time. And leading a non-profit organization. And married with a school-age child. And providing elder care support as the only child of my lovely parents. And completing an MFA in creative writing. And chairing a board of directors. And volunteering with the school. And going to church. And running a few marathons a year.

    Writing a novel while I’m doing an ungodly number of things is weird, but I’m actually doing it. I’ve puttered around the margins of this story for years, trying to write my way in. How many times have I started a new draft, a new outline? It was time that I needed. Because now, the real novel is on.

    I’ve written hundreds of pages, and write four a day on average. Every day. No matter what. I have an outline I’m more than halfway through, and am 136 pages into the draft that is actually going to be the real first draft, the serious first draft. The first time I ran a marathon I started tearing up around mile 24 because I realized I was far enough to actually finish. I have reached this feeling with this novel. I trust it. I will finish this first serious draft.

    How is this possible? Especially given the number of commitments I’ve listed above?

    Here’s my secret: Writing my novel is actually the most relaxing thing I do.

    It’s gotten to the point where I’m in out-of-body mode when I’m writing my novel. I just zone out and let ‘er rip on the page.

    Perhaps I have reached the maturity to write in flow (I am a merciless self-editor) because I have finally come to accept the real thing they teach you in MFA programs. Everything you write is only going to be rewritten. Again. Again. And again. And just when you think you’re about done, someone new will tell you to take it from the top once more in this new way that requires more work, more time. (The never-ending workshops of the MFA are their own topic, but I will note with envy the wise words of one of my favorite colleagues in my program: “I hate these people.”)

    I have an Oura ring, which is constantly mad at me, in its polite Finnish way. I have learned: My body is showing a physiological stress response pretty much all the time. For example: Folding laundry is especially rough on my stress levels, apparently. But this is not addressable. I am a mom. I am always folding laundry. This fact is only made worse by the fact that I’m a distance runner. Talk about heart rate. (In an amusing paradox, whereas my husband very much wants his Apple Watch to track every bit of exercise he does for tracking purposes, I sometimes take my ring off for a long run so it won’t dock my readiness scores for the next few days.)

    The amazing thing is the proof of my novel love is in my pulse. Short of sleep, there is no time my body is more relaxed than when I am writing my novel. Interestingly, this doesn’t apply to other times I am writing (creatively or professionally) or working at the same computer and desk. But if my vanilla novel-writing candle is lit, and I’ve got my coffee cup beside me, and the for-real first draft is open, it’s on.

    And this is how I know that I’m writing a novel for real this time. That I’ll actually finish. That it doesn’t matter if I have a million other things going on. Because writing the novel has become the best part of my day, and I miss it when I’m not doing it. I want to be in that seat even when the scene is sputtering. The novel is not an aspiration, a chore, or even an end. The process has become the point.

    As with running, when I’m writing the novel I am free. In a trance. Who cares if it’s any good? I don’t think I’ve done anything as beneficial for my mental and physical health in years.