When Life Interferes with Blogging

It’s been a long time since I wrote to this blog. After my last post I purposely took some time off. Soon after that I decided that I would not be writing to it anymore. I’m not sure why I made that decision, but it was OK with me. I just had no interest in it anymore. Now, 16 months later, I am once again motivated to write. So for now I’ll write…

I’ll start off by summarizing the last 16 months. Shortly after I quit writing, I ran and finished the Bighorn 100M trail race. It was like nothing I’ve ever done, one of the most excruciating and exhilarating experiences of my life. It’s been too long to try to write the details now, so I won’t even try. I suffered like never before, destroyed my feet ,and took over 3 months for my blisters to heal. I have pictures of my feet after the race, but they are inappropriate for public viewing.

After the run, Kara and I went to Yellowstone for a vacation of camping and hiking. Our trip did not work out as planned because I could not walk, let along hike, but we had a great time nevertheless. After all, we weren’t just celebrating the end of a long training schedule and a successful race, we were also celebrating our new child on the way. Kara was 8 weeks pregnant at the time of the race.

In February, our first kid was born. His name is Micah and I never knew how deeply I could care about someone or something until I met him. It put my priorities into perspective, but not in the simplistic way you might think. Before he was born, I would have guessed that any priority changes would have been working less, running less, and spending more time with my family. Well, that’s only kind of how it has worked out. Micah is 5 months old now, and I’m still figuring things out. But one thing I’ve noticed is that having him hasn’t forced me to push any priorities down. It just made me squeeze in something at the top. I have to be more efficient with my time, I have to make sure no time is wasted, but I don’t have to drop anything that is important to me. My runs now are less consistent, they are straight to the point and back home, they are sometimes run through the night while Micah and Kara sleep, or they are at times while he is taking a nap. But I’ve been able to run just as much and still have time with my family. I’ve had to remove some weekday runs, and supplement them with longer weekend runs, but it’s a small sacrifice.

So now that everyone is up to date on my life, I can talk about where I am now. I just finished my heavy training for the Tahoe Rim Trail 100M race which is in 3 weeks. As of today I’m tapering. I’ll do a few more tough runs, but nothing long. My legs are completely trashed. It’s taken awhile to realize it, but yesterday it became abundantly clear that I’m physically exhausted. I’m not recovering quickly, and I’m getting slow. Both are signs of overtraining for me. The good news is that I avoided injury, and I have plenty of time to really recover and to be strong for the race. Now I’m going to focus on my nutrition and my mental strength, which are the only two things standing in my way from a successful run at Tahoe.

One more thing I want to mention before I go. Over the past 6 months, I have taken terrible care of my body. While I exercise plenty, my nutrition and other habits have been terrible. I eat bad, I drink bad, I haven't cross-trained, I haven't stretched, I haven't recovered... I've done everything wrong and undisciplined, and if I wasn't blessed with a naturally healthy body I'd be 220lbs, slow, and injured. About a week ago I decided to change that. I want to document this change in writing so I'm not tempted to regress.

Until next time…