Last Place Runner

I’m still not really on a structured schedule. I thought I would love that, and maybe I will one day. But it’s difficult right now.

We were supposed to get a little snow and ice yesterday, but the day started out warm. I applied for two jobs, saw my husband off to work, and then decided I should probably get out of the house.

The great thing about where we live is that the cities are working together to make trails connecting one to the next. We have miles and miles of trails, bike trails, and greenways just where I live. So I decided to do one of my favorite routes, starting at the dog park.

The mural along the North Bentonville Trail.

I walked from Bentonville to Bella Vista and back on paved trails. I love it because there’s plenty to see and there’s usually a few people biking, walking, running, or just meandering. I did a bunch of walking and a little meandering yesterday.

The trail goes under several major roadways, which is kind of fun to run under with semi trucks roaring overhead. The tunnels are always cool and damp. And dark. And not the kind of place my mother would want me to go alone.

The first pedestrian tunnel going from the dog park toward the lake.

The lake has a disc golf course and, weirdly enough, four really old headstones right off the path.

Old graves near a disc golf course

Then you disappear into the woods with the lake on one side and limestone bluffs on the other. And a handy old staircase. Early one morning, my friend Amber and I saw a very strange man on that side of the lake trail. Amber was certain it was Dracula, returning to his crypt after a night out. She vowed she would never be on that trail alone. But I have been a hundred times on my own and have never seen anything scarier than a lap dog in a sweater.

Stairs to Dracula’s house.

I went without my GPS again. Wearing it tends to make me too worried about pace. My Fitbit just keeps up with my mileage and I don’t worry about going slow. And yesterday I got to stop and chat to a few people along the way. I probably wouldn’t have if time was ticking away on my running watch.

The nearer I got to my car, the colder it got. And not just because I’d trekked 5 miles from one town to the next. I couldn’t warm up even after I got home and my muscles were tired, so I took a nice hot bath with epsom salts.

My husband came home early from work. He took a nap while I fed the dogs and got dinner ready. I got an email response from one of the jobs I’d applied for that morning. I was totally expecting it to be a “thanks but no thanks” kind of thing, but it wasn’t! They wanted to schedule an interview! So I have an interview next Friday. That definitely lifted my spirits!

Then it did start with the freezing rain and snow. It wasn’t enough to interfere with anyone’s day or cancel school or anything. I cleaned house for a couple of hours this morning, then I decided to go to Crystal Bridges. A new exhibit opens in a couple of weeks, but they had some stuff I hadn’t seen yet. I am so sorry for not getting the artists’ names. But here are a few of my favorites from my trip to the museum today.

Mosh pit oil painting.

Running box fans and sombreros.

Crochet owl, part of a bigger piece that covers the entrance to the gallery. Fun!

The museum didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Maybe because something about all that old art just really creeped me out. I’d never been to the museum (any museum) alone, and the experience made me really uncomfortable. And I’m not the kind of person who is uncomfortable doing anything on my own. There was a piece of art in one gallery that was making a whirring, tornado-y sound and something about it just gave me the heebie-jeebies. I also get the dry heaves when I see abandoned houses with the front door open. Who knows? I’m not trying to say I’m not crazy.

My husband has class tonight until 10, so I’m going to have to fill all these hours somehow. I haven’t been able to attend any of my beekeeper meetings in several months, so I think I’ll go to our meeting tonight. Then there’s just tomorrow and my first week of not working will be over. I have a writing assignment to do for my interview next week, so I plan to spend lots of time researching their company and their competitors to try to get the tone just right. Or, as most people call it, spend all week dicking around on the internet.

My job ended on Friday. I’ve said before that it has been a stressful year, so I was glad, in a way, to have some kind of finality.

I had an interview this morning, though, at City Hall. The mayor needs someone to work in the office half days for a few weeks. That would be perfect for me. A little bit of extra income for a month or so could be the financial difference in making it to the next job. After my interview, I went to open my unemployment claim. And I’ll keep those observations to myself.

Running, though. Right? I am doing a One Mile Run Club and I am 100% so far. This morning it was spitting snow, but after I got my errands sorted, it was perfect for an outside run. I didn’t bother with my heart rate monitor or GPS, I just had on my Fitbit. I think I got about 1.5 miles and plenty of sunshine. I would’ve kept going, but I left my phone in the kitchen to charge and I didn’t want to miss any calls. And, obviously, nobody called. That’s always the way.

If I am offered the job with the city, I may start as soon as Wednesday. I’ll go in at noon every day and work until 5. I will like that because I’ll have plenty of time to run before work. Oh, and apply for jobs and take care of the house and all that other stuff. But devoting more time to running has always been part of the plan when the time came that I wasn’t working.

So that’s where I am now. My first day of unemployment was pretty busy, but that didn’t leave me a lot of time to worry about things I can’t control.

I don’t ever ask myself why I’m running. I used to every time, every step. Now I run because I run.

I started running without knowing how. I started running in a way that was probably bad for me. And during one of those awful first runs, I realized I wasn’t running for sport. I was literally running away from and trying to outrun nearly everything happening in my life.

Jan. 31 of last year, I went to work. It was a Friday. As soon as I got there, I started wondering if I should tell my team I was leaving. I shouldn’t have worried. Just after 9 that morning, my mother called. It’s not unusual for me to communicate with her on any given day, but usually it’s an email or a text. A phone call scared me. My dad had had a heart attack and was in an ambulance. She wasn’t with him. And I was in an office building nearly four hours away. I hung up, grabbed my coat and barely managed to say, “My dad. Heart attack,” before I was out on the stairwell.

My dad had told my mother the night before that his shoulder hurt. He never came to bed. She got up the next morning, got ready for work. Because they were spending that weekend here, she asked him to drive her to work and pick her up before lunch so they could just come straight here. He was still dozing on the sofa, but he said he didn’t want to do that. So she went to work.

When he finally decided something should be done, he called her first. “I don’t feel good,” is what he said. My mother, who works at the best cardiac hospital in the state, started running. Her co-worker, a longtime family friend, thankfully had the sense to call my parents’ neighbor, who came right over to wait with my dad. By the time the first responders arrived, my uncle was there, too. My dad tried to convince the paramedics that his brother was taking him to the hospital, but nobody — especially not my uncle — wanted any part of that.

I’m letting the story get too far away from me. A few hours later, I was standing in front of my dad. He was in the ICU, but he was sitting up and talking. I knew at that point that it was a miracle. No one else has arteries like my dad had and lived to tell it. Anyone else would have been awaiting funeral arrangements. But there he was, kind of irritated that I’d made such a long drive just to sit around in a hospital. Of course, my brother and his family had come, too, and my brother said we’d had to come in case we needed to divide up my dad’s possessions. The good thing about us is that we like to make fun of ourselves.

We spent the weekend there and drove home in a snowstorm, which irritated both my parents even more. I took a couple of days off work the next week. And the week after that, we were all called into a meeting at the end of the day — it was Feb. 13 — and told that our client had decided to give our account to a different agency. We had until the end of May to find new jobs.

Over the next couple of months, I did little else but look for a job and worry about my dad. He had two procedures to clear out his arteries, the first one being completely unsuccessful. Because there was so much trauma from that attempt, his doctor had to wait four weeks to try again — this time using the big guns. It was hard to keep going to a job when there was no incentive to work, especially when I felt like I could have helped my parents in some way. But neither was willing to let me come home for my dad’s procedures.

I wasn’t having any luck finding a job, either. I was glad that I had until the end of May, but that window was closing fast. My dad finally went back to work toward the middle of March. And by the middle of April, I had lined up a 17-week freelance job that would get me through the summer.

I met my friend Amber at that job — and a lot of other really great people. We started “taking walks” every day to bitch about our nutty boss. Then we started getting together on weekends to walk the trails. Then, as that assignment was ending, I miraculously landed another short-term writing job and went seamlessly from one to the other without ever missing a day of pay.

I’ve been on that job since August, knowing it would end when the work moves to California to a new team being assembled out there. It’s been a great experience, but I assumed that I would make another seamless transition to the next great opportunity. My job ends next Friday, Jan. 30. Just one day before what I feel like was the beginning of a long, uncertain year. A year I spent running. Figuratively and literally. I’m still running in the figurative sense, and I’m still getting nowhere.

It’s been difficult this past week to have a positive outlook. I’m sure there’s some kind of clinical name for it, but I’m reliving my dad’s brush with death. I even had a dream this week that he was dead in a hospital bed, his eyes black and still in his head. I can’t understand it. He’s in good health and I see him all the time. But, even now, a year later, I am “all shook up” that he seriously could be dead and buried by now. I have tiny bouts of crying every single day.

But, I also run every day. I’m doing a One-Mile Run Club for the year and I’m right on schedule. Some days I even get ahead of schedule. It’s been something good to look forward to and never a chore. Even though I started out trying to outrun everything that plagued me, I needed desperately to take charge of myself. This long, uncertain year made me get real with myself. I’ve spent my lifetime telling myself things would be different when —-. But things weren’t different until I made them that way. And if you think changes are too hard to keep and goals are too hard to reach, you’re being unfair and maybe even cruel to yourself.

What do you want to do? What would you do if you had 20 minutes of free time every day? Does it scare you to think about it? You can start today. But call your dad first.

I have been running still, just not writing about it. Partly because Christmas and New Year kept me pretty busy, and partly because my job ends this month and I am freaking out proper about that.

On weekends I’ve started doing what I cleverly call a 5K for One. Either on the streets or on the treadmill, I put in at least one 3.1-mile distance on my own on my day off. And last week I did a 5K organized by my good old running coach. He called it the Commitment Day 5K and it was held on Jan. 1.

When we woke up Thursday morning, I knew it was cold. And it was a national holiday and we didn’t have to work, so I almost talked myself into bailing on the race. I’m glad I didn’t. I saw a few people I met in the running group, plus my mentor — the 3-year-old boy who ran with me during those first weeks of training. So I was actually really glad I went, just like I knew I would be.

The route took us through the grounds of the art museum and through two local parks. There were bagels and water at the finish line, too! But we were going out of town for the long weekend, so then it was a rush to get home, clean up, pack up and head out.

Needless to say, I paid dearly Thursday night for not stretching enough and not rehydrating. I could have drunk a bucket of whiskey and smoked three packs of cigarettes before bed Thursday night and I would not have suffered any more than I did. I guess sitting the car for 3.5 hours right after a race wasn’t such a great idea. Every inch of my body was misery. And I’ve never had a headache as bad as the one I had that night, unless you count the raging hangovers of my past. And that headache could have given those hangovers a fair fight. God, it was awful.

I’d gotten a really cool foam roller for Christmas, but I felt like I was bringing too much stuff with us for a weekend at my parents’ house, so I left it at home. But when we got up Friday morning, I had to go out and buy another one. Everything hurt.

After a few minutes with my new foam roller, I was feeling much better. I joined a local One Mile Run Club and all the other members were posting their mileage for the day on Friday. So I did eventually get a mile in on my mother’s treadmill.

My goal for the year is to keep running, of course, and to do one official 5K race every month. I’m registered for an 8K in February, but I don’t know that I’ll be ready for that kind of distance in six weeks. I won’t have to run it all, but I would really like to! After that race, though, I don’t have another race planned. With my job ending, and without another lined up, I really hate to start throwing down money for races or planning to travel to races when we will soon be without my income. My husband says I can’t let that keep me from my goals. But I can’t help thinking how race-fee money could go toward groceries some day.

In the meantime, I plan to do my 5K for One every week. And, if I end up with a lot of extra free time in the next few weeks, I will look at doing a 5K for One several times a week. I am also registered for a virtual 5K on Jan. 25 to run with Katie, one of my biggest motivators who inspired me to give running a try, on her birthday.

I read about RunningAHEAD on Katie’s blog, too, and I have been looking over their site this morning to map routes in my neighborhood for specific distances. I knew there had to be a good tool like that somewhere on the internet, but having Katie’s endorsement cut out a lot of trial-and-error research for me.

I plan to do my mile today during lunch so I can spend the evening catching up on laundry and settling back in after our weekend away. It’s also really freaking cold right now, so I’m going to start some chili in the slow cooker at lunch, too.

Even though it is cold, I learned the hard way how important it is to drink enough water. I only half-assed it the day before my race and really didn’t drink more than half a bottle of water after my race last week. But I will say that incident was all it’s going to take to make a believer out of me.

When I started running in October, I wanted to throw myself into it completely. I wanted to do the 5k training and roll right into the half-marathon training. But I hesitated.

I’m glad now that I did. The half training program only takes 250 runners and by the time I decided that maybe I didn’t totally hate running, it was full. I asked at the activities center to get on the wait list, and I did, but one of my coaches warned me that even the wait list was long.

I’m OK with that now. I don’t want to burn out on running my first year.

This time of year is crazy and busy, but I’ve kept up my running. Even this morning when it was raining. It was 49 degrees at 6:20? Yes, I’ll take it.

I decided to make up my own schedule to include intervals and easy runs during the week and at least one official 5k distance during the weekend. I did my “5K for one” in the neighborhood on Saturday. Yes, I walked some. But the running I did was great. It felt good. When I was about half a mile from home, I really kicked it into gear, just the way Coach had taught me in training. I ran hard all the way to the finish line, which was my driveway.

We had Christmas with my side of the family Saturday afternoon. My parents own an old farmhouse in the country. The living room leads to a bedroom which opens into a sun room, which goes right into a mudroom, which connects to the kitchen, and the kitchen connects to the dining room and the dining room leads right back into the living room. My nephews have spent years running laps around the house, so this year I decided to join them. We ran 13 laps around the house, which was kind of funny because they’re just kids and I’m damn-near 40. I racked up another 4,000 steps and I didn’t need to collapse on the couch to catch my breath like the kids did. It was really noisy and wild, like Christmas with the family should be.

My current contract work assignment ends at the end of January. That’s getting uncomfortably close. And while it’s the right time of year to make a commitment to the goals we have for the coming year, I’m nervous about putting this out there: I want to run a 5K race each month of 2015. But racing has registration fees. I hope I won’t be out of work at all, or for a very short time. But my husband says I can’t let that interfere with my goals.

My first race of 2015 is on Jan. 1. I have a race in February and one I think I’ll do in March. I’m looking into out-of-town races for the spring, when the threat of ice and snow is past. And because I’ll have to make that decision in 2015, another goal is to register for the half-marathon training for the 2016 half marathon.

Changing from bad to good is as easy as taking your first step!