A Happy Run

I knew I was going to have a good run tonight.

This is rare.

But I have been feeling so much better emotionally and mentally lately. I’ve gone from not wanting to be alive or get out of bed and halfheartedly muscling my way through my days to feeling like I’m really living life again.
(I know I’ve seesawed between posts like these and posts about how I’m depressed again, but that’s life with chronic depression.)

My life feels like it’s coming together in California in ways it didn’t even a few weeks ago. I’m joining things—Junior League, The Wing. I’m volunteering with Girls on the Run. I adopted a new dog, and I am IN LOVE. WITH HER. She’s a shih tzu rescue I named Lucy. (Lucy means light, and also my mom loved I Love Lucy.)

My life just feels really full right now, and I’m happy my running is following suit. “It’s easier to run when you’re not struggling so deeply,” said my dear friend Morgan, and she is a very smart woman.

It was the 100% right decision, but I’m still a little wistful that I won’t be running NYC next weekend, but I just wasn’t there. But even starting to train brought back my love for running and how it helps you with goal-setting and pride in your hard work. I’m doing a 10K with friends in December, and I’m going to work on training for it and doing some speedwork and staying on a regular running schedule.

I’m better now at seeing that a bad day isn’t the end of the world (because some days, it did feel that way), and so I know I’ll still have some runs that will suck. But I just want some of that running strength back. I don’t care as much about pace any more, but I’d still like to improve a bit from where I am right now.

Tonight I ran three miles. Since the NYC Marathon two years ago, I’ve had a mental block of running more than two miles. I broke through that temporarily while I was training, but since I stopped, it started creeping back. But three miles is half an hour—I’ve got that. I’ve been doing some treadmill interval runs on my own and doing a class that’s similar to OrangeTheory and those short sucky interval have reminded me I can get through running slower outside. It’s come full circle. That’s how I started running originally.