Week 29: Shame

One of the things I’ve had to do on this fitness journey is learn how to make healthier foods.  I know that theoretically it should be easy, but it was difficult for me.  I wasn’t sure how to swap out higher fat foods for lower fat choices and still end up with something edible.  I had a couple of friends that really helped along the way, and one of them turned me on to the Chocolate Covered Katie Blog.  Because, lets face it, everyone wants to have dessert, and Katie has some really tasty recipes that are vegan and virtually guilt free.  Her blog posts are fun, punctuated with colorful pictures of her food, and her recipes are easy.

What I did not realize was that Katie was the victim of some rather vicious rumors regarding her weight and body image.  This week she posted an entry titled “Chocolate Covered Katie Anorexic?” on her blog, and regardless of the fact that she and I are on complete opposite sides of the weight spectrum, I found myself tearfully empathizing.  It is truly sad the way people judge others, especially when they don’t even really know the people they are judging!  But it happens, all the time, and even more so now that we’re an electronic social media society.  It’s so easy to leave a snarky comment on someone’s photo or blog, and often we do it without even really thinking about what we’re saying.  I don’t think people really understand the power of their words, whether good or bad.  I don’t think they realize how much words can hurt.

I grew up dealing with snickers, teasing, and outright name-calling because I was overweight.  I had to endure well-meaning relatives making hurtful comments because they felt it might be helpful if I was shamed into doing something about my weight.  I was told over and over that I couldn’t wear certain clothes because I was the wrong size, shape, or height.  I was told by a close relative that I was pretty, but I’d never really be beautiful.  (Yes, that really happened).  I spent most of my childhood and young adulthood feeling nothing but shame every time I looked into a mirror because society in general had me believing there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t lose enough weight to look like the models in the most recent issue of Teen magazine.  I’m not alone in that experience, and it’s not just overweight people that have to deal with it, either.  Thin women deal with the same kind of cruelty.  People tell them to eat a sandwich, or ask if they are suffering from some sort of eating disorder, or told that they need to eat more because they are too thin.

Body-shaming happens along the entire weight spectrum, and it frustrates the hell out of me.  I don’t understand why there even has to be a societal norm when it comes to someone’s weight or size.  Why can’t we just simply be and accept each other for who we are?   Why can’t we celebrate the diversity in our lives, rather than trying to hammer everyone into the same mold?  I for one am fed up.  I’ve made a conscious decision to no longer buy into the bullcrap and to speak up when I see body shaming happening.  Everyone is beautiful in their own unique way, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

Week 28: Failure and Fear

I’m afraid of failure.  I don’t think that I’m alone in this, but after failing to reach my 40 minute 5K goal last week,  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about failure and how I let it affect me.

I don’t remember having a lot of failures as a child.  I was a good student and I happily worked my ass off in school to get decent grades and do my parents proud.  I took piano lessons from the time I was six years old right through high school and played two pieces in a piano concert every one of those years and as far as I can remember, I never once messed up enough to think I’d failed to give a good performance.  I was in several school plays and musicals and never had difficulty remember lines and songs. I gave speeches in class and barely batted an eye. Most of it just seemed easy to me. If I wanted to do something, I just did it.

And then my freshman year in college that one Sunday morning happened. My grandmother’s church invited me to play the offertory on a Sunday morning and I accepted.  I played Beethoven’s Fur Elise, and I was fabulous during the first half and then for some reason I cannot explain, I lost my fingering and was like so many deer in the headlights.  I could not recover.  I had to stop for nearly a full thirty seconds and just breathe before I could even start again and do the piece any sort of justice.  I felt terrible for the rest of the day.  I felt like I’d let my grandmother down, and I was so embarrassed that I could barely make eye contact with anyone there.

Looking back on that now, I still feel shame, because I can see that I allowed my memories of that moment and the resulting fear of failure to all but kill my dreams of being a serious musician.   I couldn't perform in public after that.  People would ask and I would say “no” without even giving it a thought because I never wanted to feel that terrible again.  In fact, I all but gave it up.  I rarely sat down to play, not even for my own pleasure, and I would firmly and quickly change the subject if anyone ever asked me why.  Just the mere thought of performing in front of an audience crippled me with fear.

That fear bled over into other aspects of my life.  I found myself getting really anxious while handling work-related projects because I didn't want the embarrassment of failing in those situations.  I would give up on my dreams before I even started because I feared I wouldn't have the skills to do what needed to be done to bring those dreams to life.  In short, I lived a very safe--and unfulfilling--life for several years.  I was just too scared to take risks in any aspect of my life.

Thankfully, I did eventually get over it.  I have good friends and family who helped me see that failures are stepping stones towards fulfilling my dreams rather than the end of them.  I've learned that I have to pick myself up and try again every single time, because with enough hard work I’ll make it there, even if I fail several times on the way.  And that is why I signed myself up for another 5K this coming Sunday.  I’m going to go for that 40 minutes again.  I’m confident that I can do it, but if I don’t, I will try again.  And I will keep trying until I reach that goal.

And then I will set another goal and work towards it.  I won’t stop running and I will keep raising the bar.  I am going to run a marathon someday.

And just in case anyone is wondering, I did get over my fear of public performances.  I am not playing the piano much these days, but I joined a choir that is full of wonderful, loving people led by a remarkable director.  With their help, I have overcome my fear, and music is a major part of my life again.  I’m so very grateful for that.

Week 27: Fourth of July 5K

I went into yesterday’s 5k wanting to finish it in 40 minutes or less.  It wasn’t an unreasonable goal. I’ve been averaging 12 minute, 30 second miles in my training of late, so I was feeling fairly certain I could finish it in 40 minutes.  I went to bed Thursday night feeling pretty excited about what the next day would bring.

Things did not go as planned.

I woke to a killer sinus headache the morning of the race, the kind that makes you nauseous and want to stay in bed.  I forced myself out of bed and took both ibuprofen and sudafed with my breakfast.  I drank as much water as I could stand.  By the time I made it to the starting area an hour later I was just beginning to feel better.  The headache was down to a dull roar and I was able, for the most part, to ignore it.  I paced up and down the street to warm my muscles up and loosen my joints.  By the time the 5K actually started I was feeling pretty good.

This course, thankfully, was nowhere near as hilly as the last course I ran.  The hills were there, but none of them were particularly steep.  I found myself walking for 30 second intervals here and there, but I was still doing pretty good, and when I checked my time at the one mile marker I was on track.  

I had just spotted the two mile marker when the muscles in my left calf started to spasm.  I was shocked.  Believe it or not, I’d never had that happen to me in all the time I’ve been training for these races.  The pain was excruciating and I had to slow down considerably until the cramp in my calf eased up a bit.  By the time I was running at a decent pace again, I was turning the last corner.

I could see the finish line in the distance, and I started to up my pace a bit.  When I was close enough to read the time on the clock, my heart seemed to skip a beat and then sink into my stomach.  The time read 40:23.  I used the last of my reserves to get myself across the finish line with a time of 42:01--1 minute and 31 seconds faster than my last race, but 2 minutes, one second slower than I’d wanted.  The disappointment I felt in that moment was so heavy I felt like I couldn’t breathe.  I hadn’t realized how much time I’d lost at the beginning of that 3rd mile.

The first sob came as a volunteer handed me a bottle of water.  I managed to take a few sips before the second sob escaped me.  By then my husband had found me, and after seeing my expression, he wrapped his arms around me and held on tight.  I hid my face against his shoulder and cried.  Looking back at that moment now, I can’t quite put a finger on why I was so upset.  It wasn’t like I didn’t beat my last time.  But I had my heart set on finishing in 40 minutes, and that little failure hurt more than I imagined it would.

Eventually my husband and I made our way to breakfast at our favorite cafe, and after devouring a blueberry bran muffin I found that I was able to think about the race more objectively.  So I didn’t finish the race in 40 minutes.  But I did finish, and I was faster than the last race.  I had to admit to myself that even though I didn’t finish in 40 minutes, I had still made significant progress.  I felt a little better about the whole thing after coming to that conclusion.  

And there’s always next time.

Week 26: Halfway

This week marks the halfway point of my Project 52!  Honestly, I’m amazed at my perseverance--historically my track record for consistent journaling and blog posts has been less than stellar.  Then again, as I’ve already mentioned, I’m not exactly the same person I was when I started this, so maybe the fact that I’m still here after six months isn’t all that unbelievable!

That said, I don’t have anything earth-shattering to share this week.  I’m still chewing on last week’s revelation that at this point losing weight is less important than my training.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that and am working on redesigning my goals to accommodate the shift in focus.  I’m working on a faster mile now, and am shooting to finish my next 5K in 40 minutes.  That’s three and a half minutes faster than the last 5K I ran.  So stay tuned to see how that comes out--my next 5K is on July 4th.

My focus on food has shifted from counting calories to maintenance of my current weight.  I’m concentrating more on what I’m eating rather than how much I’m eating.  When I started this whole weight loss thing I was still eating meat with every meal.  Now I might eat meat two or three times a month.  Eventually, I believe that number will be zero and I will be a total vegetarian.  In fact, I’ll go one further and say that the thought of me being one hundred percent vegan isn’t as unfathomable as it might have been a year ago.  I didn’t think I’d ever be able to give up dairy, but I’m starting to understand that it isn’t going to be as hard as I once thought.  And after perusing several vegan cookbooks the assumption I had that vegan food would be boring has been proved to be untrue.  So, yeah, I’m pretty sure that I’ll be a complete vegan in the near future.

Week 25: Reassess

Sunday’s weigh-in was an exercise in frustration.  I didn’t gain any weight, but I didn’t lose any, either.  It marked the 6th week of my second plateau, and I will admit, I was frustrated enough that I shed a few tears.  And even though I know why I’m getting nowhere on the scales, it doesn’t make it any easier on an emotional level.  Despite a few days of consuming more calories that I should, I’ve been working hard, so the lack of progress for a sixth week in a row was heart-breaking.

Fortunately, I have good friends.

One of those friends has been on her own fitness journey for quite some time, and she has been invaluable to my own journey in both guidance, support and endless inspiration.  This particular friend knew I was upset after reading last week’s blog post, and she started up a G-chat conversation with me immediately after reading it.  Five exchanges in she sent me this question:

“If you never lost another pound . . . could you be happy?”

And everything came to a screeching halt.  Wait, what?  I read the question over two more times, just to make sure I’d read right.  See, this friend doesn’t ask me stuff like that just for the hell of it, because she knows that even the mere process of thinking about that kind of thing can really upset me.   Asking that question was her way of telling me that I was overlooking something, and that I needed to step back and see the bigger picture.  So instead of answering with what might have been a reflexive “no”, I made myself stop and seriously consider that question.  It was a few minutes later before I finally typed:

“Yeah, I think I could be.”

And after I came to that realization, I could finally see what it was I was missing.  I had reached the point in the journey where it was time to reassess my goals and priorities.   And having done that, I’ve come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that weight loss is no longer the main focus of this journey.  Being lighter would make my running goals easier to reach, but they certainly are not impossible the way I am now, either.  So, while I will still be counting calories to make sure I don’t gain any weight back, I’m not focusing on those scales quite so much anymore.  Instead I’ll be focusing more on my running and shaving minutes off my average mile times, because I still dream about running that marathon.

And I suspect that at some point in this process the weight will start to come off again whether or not I’m worrying about it.   I’m just making a conscious decision to not worry about it anymore.

Week 24: Plateau #2

I’ve hit a second plateau.  I’ve been on the weight loss yo yo for the past few weeks--lose, gain, lose, gain, lose again--and it has been a struggle to not be discouraged, because I’m pretty much at the same weight I was five weeks ago.  I have to keep reminding myself that I’m currently training for another 5K and that means I’m building quite a bit of muscle as I go.  Muscle weighs more than fat, believe it or not.  So, if I’m gaining more muscle weight than losing fat weight the scale will of course show a gain.  I know that in my head, but the truth is, on an emotional level that knowledge doesn’t matter much.

It gets excruciatingly difficult when I don’t have visible results and that negative voice in my head is urging me to just give up.  This is when I have to focus hard on the process rather than my final goals.  I have to make myself keep counting calories.  I have to get out and move every day, even on non-training days.  I have to keep logging my steps and running times.  I have to concentrate on those little things or I risk folding under the anxiety and fear of eventual failure.  It’s the only reason I’ve not given up after 5 weeks of what feels like no progress at all.

Week 23: Lessons Learned During 5K #2

Okay, this week’s post is much earlier than usual, but I ran my second 5K today and I just have so many reflections that I want to get this all down while it’s still fresh!  First of all, I beat my last 5K time by 44 seconds.  Okay, it’s not a huge difference, but it was faster!  Progress, not perfection, right??  I was pretty happy to beat that time, even if only by seconds. :)

Of course, this 5K was as much a learning experience as the first, so here are some new lessons I learned today (or in the case of the first, had to relearn!):

1. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.  I did better with that this time around, but I still needed more!  Thankfully, there were water stations at every mile marker so I managed to not get sick from dehydration, but you can bet I’ll drink even more before the race on July 4!

2. As much as I hate going over my calorie allowance, I really need to eat more than normal the day before a race.  I kind of thought that because this was just a short 5K I wouldn’t really need to do any of the carb loading that longer distance runners do, but the nasty case of the shakes I got as I was sitting down to brunch with my family says otherwise.  My blood sugar was really, really low and I had to drink a portion of the orange juice my husband had ordered before I stopped shaking.

3. Hills are still a humbling experience.  I dealt with them better this time around, but only marginally.  The last mile or so was mostly uphill and had it not been for an inspiring moment in that last mile I’m not sure I would have finished as quickly as I did.  I will be doing whatever I can to get out and train on hillier terrain for the remainder of the summer!

4. And speaking of that last mile...moments of inspiration can come when you least expect them.  I was getting really, really tired as I entered the last mile of the race.  At that point I had started to chant “run till your done” in my head over and over again, but I was afraid I was about to hit the proverbial wall.  And then, suddenly, the pace car for the half marathon passed me on the left, and 30 seconds later the first place runner in the half-marathon blew by me.  He was so fast and ran like a gazelle, and  I don’t even have words for what I felt in that moment.  A year ago I might have felt intimidated to be sharing the course with such an athlete, but that’s not what I felt today.  I was just so inspired by his example, and suddenly that last mile didn’t seem quite so daunting, regardless of the uphill.  I even ran a little faster after that point. I found out a little later that the runner was 2004 New Zealand Olympiad Nick Willis, and he ran the half marathon in just over an hour today.  Awe-inspiring!  I’m really grateful for the much needed inspiration I received in that moment.  It was a moment I’ll not soon forget.

There were also little moments that just added to the brilliance of the day.  The folks at the water stations were handing out heart-felt encouragement along with refreshment. When it became obvious towards the end of the race that I was really struggling to keep up the pace, strangers on the sidelines began to assure me that I could make it.  

And finally, my mom and dad took me out to brunch after I finished, and the waitress came to our table with six glasses of water.  My mother pointed out that there were only five of us at the table, and the waitress gave her a sunny smile and replied “I figured your runner could use an extra glass.”  I thanked her profusely and did my best to not burst into emotional tears, because I realized in that moment that I’d turned another important corner in my journey.  When she’d called me a runner I hadn’t thought to disagree with her at all.  I think I might have disagreed two months ago, but today I didn’t.  Now I truly do think of myself as a runner, and for me that’s a huge step in the right direction.

I can’t wait to run another race.