Another possibility

Maybe I haven't lost my mojo. Maybe I don't hate running anymore. Maybe its just that...
running uphill at high altitude sucks! No, no, it doesn't suck. But it is really, really hard.

I went on a short 25 minute no pressure pre-airplane ride run this morning. Didn't force myself to do extra hills or anything, and I had the most lovely run I've had in a long time.

Maybe after Mt. Evans (3 weeks from today at this exact time I'll be an hour into the race) I will just try to run. Run for enjoyment. Run for the love of running. I am going to test this theory in Anchorage, which has a great series of paved trails all around the city. I'll let you know.

Heading North

Saturday we leave for a 2 week trip to Alaska. We'll start in Anchorage, hanging around with family and celebrating my cousin's Bar Mitzvah. Then my husband, 2 kids and I will head up to Denali national Park, where we hope to spend a few days camping. If the weather sucks we'll change plans, because we don't want to turn the kids off to camping completely by forcing them to be wet, cold and confined to a tent.

Tomorrow: final hike/run to Barr Camp on Pikes Peak. Then, the Saturday after we return from Alaska... Mt. Evans Ascent.

Searching for my Mojo

Yesterday my training partner Scoop wasn't feeling well, but didn't want to bag on our ambitious plan to hike the Manitou incline, continue hike/running up Pikes Peak to Barr Camp, and then run down. In deference to her illness, however, she requested that we walk all the way to Barr Camp.

I had no problem with that, especially since I feel pretty sure I'll be walking the majority of the time on the Mount Evans Ascent. Indeed, I was psyched to see what our time would be walking, since I have become somewhat nervous about meeting the cutoff times for the Mt. Evans race.

From their website: "A 2.5 hour cut-off will be in effect at Summit Lake, which is approximately 9 miles into the run." Now maybe you're thinking "Come on, Deb. You can't run 9 miles in 2.5 hours? That's slower than a 10 minute pace!"

Continue reading from the website: "Summit Lake lies at an elevation of 12,850 feet, and is 2,250 feet higher than the starting line at Echo Lake." Therein lies the problem. It's high. Really high. It's all uphill-- and keeps going up from there, 5.4 more miles all the way to up 14,264 feet. Did I mention that the 14.5 mile Mt. Evans Ascent bills itself as America's highest road race?

I've already done the Pikes Peak Ascent in 2002, the Leadville Heavy Half Marathon in 2006 and the Breck Crest Mountain race three or four times (I can't remember because once there was a snowstorm and a whiteout on the pass and we had to turn around and the run ended up being about 17 instead of 14 and I bonked and started to cry). Lived to tell the tale.

No it's not a 10 minute pace. It's a 16:40 pace. Actually, I think I can do it. But it won't be easy. I don't know why I sign up for these crazy high altitude races, since I get pretty dizzy up high. I think I can do it, especially since yesterday ended up being SO MUCH FUN! Scoop is much better at going uphill and at altitude than I am, and although I love training with her I generally feel some pressure to keep up with her. So just walking and talking was a lot of fun. And our time wasn't all that bad, either.

Oh, but just in case: "There will be buses at Summit Lake where you can take shelter. Summit crew will be notified of your withdrawal, and your summit bag will be brought down to the buses." Your summit includes warm clothes because "Even when there are warm temperatures at the starting line, the summit can be cold, windy, and has the potential for snow at any time of year."

Guess what? My kids get out of school for summer vacation tomorrow (yikes!). Guess what else? It's 46 degrees today. So it's not crazy to think that in 3 1/2 weeks there could be a snowstorm at 14,000 feet. Ah, Colorado.

Ebbs and Flows

My cousin Yoga Chickie posted about her concern that she temporarily likes gardening more than yoga. For those who don't read her blog, she's a bit obsessive about yoga.

But I can relate. Until recently, any time someone mentioned the possibility of running a marathon I was up for it. Ready to start training, ready to write the long runs (16,18,20 milers) down on my calendar, ready to buy some Gus and hit the road. Lately that fire has just... died down. I don't know on what to blame it. Marathon burnout? Other things on my mind? Concern about impending internship or the need to write my dissertation? I really don't know.

I'm kind of okay with it, allowing myself the grace to listen to my body and not force myself to go out on 20 mile runs if I have absolutely no desire to do so. I have always gotten a perverse sort of satisfaction from long runs. Now they just seem... long.

But I am also bothered very much by this development. I want to stoke the embers. It's not like I'm sitting around, and I have not slacked off on my training for the Mount Evans Ascent on June 21st. Yet I am bothered. Where do I go from here? Balance is so elusive.

And I really don't want to get fat and out of shape.

Finding Om: the sequel

Looks like Finding Om may continue sooner than expected. After the last class on Tuesday night both Julie (the yoga teacher) and I were feeling pretty pumped. Things felt like they had gone really well, and we immediately began talking about continuing this program, broadening the target audience to include all eating and body image disorders and marketing it to the general public. Obviously there is a lot of work to do, but a lot of it has been done already.

Happily, our feelings of success are confirmed, at least anecdotally, by the responses I have gotten from the returned program evaluation forms.

Yes, people feel more aware of their bodies as a result of participation in Finding Om. Yes, people feel more in control of their bingeing as a result of participating in Finding Om. Yes, people feel Finding Om was beneficial to them. Yes, people would do this again or recommend it to a friend. Perhaps most importantly, Yes, people would pay money to participate in a program which combined yoga and talk therapy.

When asked how much they would pay per session, given that an hour of yoga is about $15 and group therapy ranges from $25-60 for 75-90 minutes, Finding Om participants threw out numbers from $10 (ridiculous) to $45 (wow).

As I read the responses I literally cried tears of joy. I am so relieved that my project worked-- at least in people's anecdotal responses. Today I am going to enter in the rest of the assessment data and compare pre- and post-intervention responses. I only have half the "exit interview" forms, so I can't conclude anything yet. But I hope hope hope hope hope that my results are statistically significant.

Even if they aren't, Julie and I know that what we did was successful. And I know that I want to continue doing this. And it looks like we will do so sooner that later.

Finding Om ends tonight

I can't believe it, but ten weeks has gone by already and Finding Om ends tonight. Whether my results are statistically significant or not (which of course I hope they will be), I have total confidence that what I have piloted is a good thing. Based on what people are saying in the discussion group, I know they are being helped by this.

I am excited to see the results. And I am not even dreading writing them up too much. Yes, I'd rather play outside all summer, but I really hate having unfinished projects hanging over my head. I would say an unwritten dissertation definitely falls into that category.

Worlds Best Compost Tumbler

That's how it's billed in the ad, anyway. It arrived. It's heavy. It needs assembly. After my regularly scheduled workout of the day (today's program: hike the Manitou Incline, run down), that will be my project. I have a feeling there may be some frustration involved.

Tomorrow is the last night of Finding Om. I'm not sure how I feel about this. For one thing, it means I need to move onto the writing phase of my dissertation. After 10 years as a professional journalist, writing does not daunt me. But after my last month pretending to be a landscaper, sitting inside for a huge part of the day does sound daunting. Plus, this is a pretty high stakes piece of writing.

One day at a time. I'm not going to dive in full steam ahead until after a trip to Alaska in the beginning of June, anyway. One day at a time. I'd like to get all my data and crunch the numbers before that. Anything I can do to keep moving along so that I can defend at the end of the summer before I start internship on Sept 29th.

Talk about daunting! I haven't had a 40 hour a week job since... dare I say... 1995.

Two pounds

Well, I "lost two pounds" since yesterday. That still puts me two pounds above the weight I have come to accept as normal these days, which itself is 1-2 pounds heavier than the weight at which I'd really like to be.

Two pounds. Two pounds. I always seem to be torturing myself over two pounds. But I know that my life would be markedly better without that extra weight. If I were two pounds less I would be more popular, I'd be funnier and wittier, I'd have better sex, I'd be a better therapist, I'd be more successful in every way.

My face looks to me like a giant beach ball today but my husband, who had an unusually free morning, has been hanging around talking to me like everything is completely normal. What's wrong with him? Doesn't he know that he should hate me because I am bloated?

Tonight is the second-to-last meeting of Finding Om-- at least as it exists as my dissertation project. That means I will spend an hour or so looking through various meditations and preparing what I want to bring to class tonight. Maybe today some of what I read will finally sink in on a personal level.

Bloat

This morning I weigh FOUR POUNDS more than what I did last week. FOUR POUNDS. My weight this morning is more like what I would weigh at night after a large dinner or after drinking a quart of water.

I am fairly positive that this is the heaviest weight I have ever been at my morning weigh-in. EVER. I am not going to say numbers because, since I am 4'9", whatever I weight will sound ridiculously light. I don't think I've gone crazy enough to translate this into actual weight gain. I have been eating too much lately and must have been eating a lot of salt and water-retaining things. Clearly I need to stop before this added weight does turn into actual fat. I didn't even think about putting on a pair of jeans this morning.

Despite trying to be cool about the numbers on the scale I'm kind of in shock. Maybe today's weight is a wake up call to what my weight will be if I don't get my act together.

This post must seem very boring, but I am filled with incredible unease and self-loathing because of these numbers. Even though the weight is so ridiculously high that I know it has to be last night's dinner, not anything "real", it still feels really, really bad.

Yes, I place inordinate importance on how much I weigh. A day with low numbers starts out a lot better than a heavy day.

Let's just say this day isn't starting out so great.

Therapy is neither sadism nor masochism

A response to an earlier post, which I somehow just noticed, made me feel the need to clarify issues facing people with eating disorders. Eating disorders, despite appearances to the contrary, are not about eating but rather about control, largely over emotions. The relationship with food is used to replace the need to deal with difficult emotions.

People with binge eating disorder, with which the people in Finding Om have been diagnosed, eat to numb their emotions. People with eating disorders are notoriously disconnected from their bodies. They live in denial of their bodily needs, be it the need to eat (in the case of anorexics) or stop eating (as it is with binge eaters).

To break the cycle of self-abuse people need to find new, more healthy ways to deal with their emotions. This means acknowledging their bodies and coming to an understanding of how the way they have been treating their bodies is ultimately self-abusive.

In order to heal we need to learn to feel all of those difficult emotions we have been using food to avoid. And those feelings, such as shame, self-hatred and anger, are usually not pretty. And it isn't easy to begin feeling them instead of literally stuffing them down with a few bags of potato chips and a gallon of ice cream.

So to see someone cry and feel shame at how she has been treating herself to me represents a personal breakthrough for her. She is getting to a much healthier place. I get no joy out of seeing her cry; rather, I am glad to see her access those emotions and am not afraid to sit with her and support her through that difficult time.

Photographic proof

Various views of my compost bin next to a 30 gallon trash can. On further reading, it seems I may have actually crafted a mulch enclosure. I'm still trying to figure this all out.



































Me squinting into the sun

The view from my deck

Some of the job that still needs to be done

Part of what has been done

It rained quite a bit today, enabling me to cram about 4 more trash cans full of leaves into my compost/mulch enclosure once the sun came out. I have resorted to filling recycled trash bags that I bought at Whole Foods with leaves, since I am kind of sick of paying 60 cents per giant paper bag from Home Depot and my bin is full. Don't know what I'll do with them next. I've already got 10 bags filled.

Rome was not built in a day

But my compost enclosure was. Too bad I have almost already filled it and I have many, many leaves to go.

Too bad also that I just wrote a long, detailed post about this which somehow got lost between when I wrote it and tried to publish it.

To cut to the chase, thank you Commenter for your help. I will write more about this tomorrow but I have to go to sleep now. I'm sad my original post got lost because it was pretty good.

Commenter, you talked about watering the compost pile down to compact it, which makes sense. However, I live in a semi-arid climate where we spend most of our summers on water rationing, so I don't feel good about doing that. It is supposed to rain on Tuesday, so hopefully that will help. In the meantime I have been tamping the pile down with my metal garbage can, which seems to be working okay.

Tomorrow if I am feeling ambitious I will take pictures of my beautiful creation to post. But then you will all see that it is not really beautiful and actually really amateurish and kind of sucky. But it is mine and I built it and it is holding leaves quite well. So I am proud and I will show you.

Oy vey. My original post was much better than this. I think I need to take my sake-drunk ass off to bed now. For a bit more of my day see My Daughter on Genotropin for the tale of how I botched changing the cartridge on her growth hormone injections and so had to make and eat many, many chocolate chip cookies and now feel kind of sick and yuccky.

Must rake a million more leaves tomorrow...

The Compost Project

As you may have heard, I've been doing yard work. The earliest part of this was cutting away the dead stuff from my flower beds so my lovely perennials can begin to blossom. That is long done and not particularly time-consuming.

The rest of the job consists of what the CSFD calls fire mitigation. It also makes your yard look neater. Essentially this means trimming any branches under 3 feet from scrub oak and removing any of the smaller trees and clearing away the dead trees. East coasters are used to lovely tall oak trees. Well, in Colorado from the lowly acorn a mighty oak does not grow. Rather, a mighty system of scrub oak ensues, which never gets much taller than about 10 feet but has a root system more effective than a high school gossip network. They spread very efficiently, resulting in lots of new growth to have to trim, and lots of dead stuff that the new stuff crowded out. and, of course, dead leaves.

Fire mitigation aka lawn cleanup also involves trimming the lower limbs of the ponderosa pines, which have a tendency to die as the tree gets taller, and removing any new growth from under the canopy of the pines (FD calls this tinder ladder prevention).

There are lots and lots of branches. Lots and lots and lots of leaves. It's a big project.

So far I have been putting the leaves into biodegradable bags and letting the garbage men take them. However, as Yoga Chickie noted in her own garden, I too have been so impressed with the richness of the soil below the leaves that I am going to build an enclosure out of chicken wire in which to put many of the remaining leaves. This will not only save me money on the ridiculously priced bio bags, but it will also eventually give me lovely mulch to put in my flower beds.

I can't just put the leaves in a freestanding pile (which would still require carting them to the pile) as they would blow away and all my work would be for naught. Another possibly little-known fact about Colorado weather: it can be killer windy. We are too close to the mountains for the twisters that afflict our neighbors to the east, but I guess we still get the wind. So the leaves need to be enclosed.

I have also been looking into compost tumblers for kitchen scraps and other random organic waste. The two I have narrowed it down to are the Tumbleweed Compost tumbler and the Worlds Best Organic Compost Tumbler. Any feedback on either of these (or tips on how to go from concept to reality with chicken wire enclosures) is appreciated.

Too much of everything?

I am so, so tired. I went to yoga yesterday and kept having to straighten my front leg during extended warrior holds because my thigh was burning so hard it was becoming a distraction. I tried resorting to my kundalini training: that's only your mind telling you to give up. Use the breath and stay with it. It's not about muscular strength but about your will.

That wasn't working out for me. I just kept thinking how tired I was, and told myself that it was okay, I had done lots of yard work already that day, which involves going up and down a few stairs carrying small trees and large bags of leaves multiple times and so taxes my legs. Plus, I did the Manitou incline the day before, which is a mile vertical uphill and then a 4 mile run down the mountain. So I was making excuses, basically, for why I couldn't do as well as I'd like in yoga.

Then on a run today I found myself having the same thought about being tired and making more excuses for myself. I walked a few times during a 5 mile run, which is like, 4 times too many because I allow myself to walk up a really short but really steep hill in the park behind my house so that kind of doesn't count. It's too windy. I've been feeling kind of sick all week. I did yard work yesterday. Bla bla bla.

It struck me that I have been making that tired excuse for a while now (nice pun, huh?) What is really going on? I get enough sleep; it's not that kind of tired. But I don't seem to be doing anything very well, or, to put in another way, I seem to be doing everything kind of half-assed.

What is this about? Where is my fire in the belly? Have I lost my mojo? What should I do?

Just do it

"Practice for its own sake, without regard to success or failure. This is the way to equanimity. 

Be willing, and all possibility unfolds before you." 

Baron Baptiste, from Journey into Power

Today it has been snowing all day. Ah, springtime in the Rockies.