It’s been 2 years since I last ran a half marathon! I’ve covered that actual distance, but I haven’t entered an event that long in 2 freakin’ years! Want to know how I realized this? This past weekend a marathon and half marathon ran right by my house. RIGHT by my house. I could have thrown something at the runners from yard. That would have been rude, but it was something I could have done. And I ran this race 2 years ago… I PR’d, so that was cool. But it was also kind of the beginning of my downward spiral where running felt way harder than it should. I wanted to run the race this year, I don’t even have the barrier of a public-accounting-CPA-husband standing in the way of January-May races now. The only thing in my way is me.

But there are still some good moments in running… and trails are part of those. I love running on trails and getting out on a new single-track trail brings me a ton of happiness. I wish they were right outside my house instead of a drive… because even 15-20 minutes each way in the car takes up a lot of time when your weekdays are very finely tuned. That said, I have been taking some time off work to burn vacation and I feel so much more complete when I get to take those precious few hours to myself. I have been using the app Daylio to track moods and short journal entries and I had a sizable streak of “meh” and “bad” days. But the past couple of weeks where I took a day off to burn vacation and I had time to run and read a book, the rest of the week has more “good” and even some “rad” days. I need to find a way to keep that feeling going even when I’m not burning vacation.

This was a short episode, where I talk about basically these same things, in some different words.