For weeks, I've been turning over in my head what I have to say about my most recent marathon, the 2017 Marine Corps Marathon. It's been about a month and a half since race day, and I've decided that I don't have a singular takeaway from that marathon. I can't reflect on a single theme or message and lay it out neatly in this post. There's just too much there. So instead I'll focus on two outcomes that took me by surprise.

​First, the goal. While this was my fourth marathon, it was my first time training for speed. For many years one of the big questions that circulated around running for me was "how far?" This question teased, and at times nagged, me through training for my first marathon. In recent years though, that question changed to, "how fast?"

I still don't know the answer. 

Sometimes I think starting is the hardest part. For about two months this past spring, I avoided a morning HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) workout because I didn’t know what to expect. Who would be there? Would it be too random to just show up unannounced? Would I belong?. Like many of us, I feared what I did not know. When I finally made myself go, I was hooked. It reminded me of the crazy Wednesday morning November Project workouts I used to go to when I lived in Somerville. #somanystairs
A lot has happened since my last post. There’s no need to catch you up in detail, but here’s the in a nutshell version. I moved to Salem, MA. I slogged through an academic year of having three jobs, two of them technically full time teaching positions. Because of that, I spent my time grading papers, prepping for class, and crying on the weekends, usually over a stack of papers. There’s much more to it, but in short, last academic year broke me. While I know many people who play what I’ve come to call either the “adjunct game” or the “adjunct gamble” for years, it only took me a year to become fed up

Last week, Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times reported on an interval training approach to running. Since I became a runner, I've known that interval training is beneficial, that I should do it, that it will make me faster. But I never do it, unless I'm made to do it by a coach. It's so much easier, mentally and physically, to just go for a run.

Maybe that's my problem. I view running as a form of exercise, but I also view it as a way to escape. When I'm running, it's just me. It's an open invitation for me to think about anything I'd like. I can work through a problem I'm having at work or in my personal life. I can think about my writing projects. Or, I can just think about my body, how it feels to be running—my foot placement, the movement of my legs, how the wind feels against my skin, how the shade offers a slight but palpable relief from the summer sun. Running is my way of being in the moment.

The bombings at the Boston Marathon occurred two years ago today. I still find myself overwhelmed with moments of grief from time to time. There's an image reel in my head that plays over and over again at unexpected moments. I  hear a blast and watch a gray/white billow of smoke roll across the finish line. I hear the sound of scraping and see the metal lifeguard chair I had been sitting on moments before being dragged across the intersection of Boylston and Dartmouth to make space for emergency vehicles. Medical workers in white volunteer jackets with wheelchairs rush into the haze that has now covered the street. The people who emerge are coated in blood; many of them are missing limbs. It takes seconds for these images run through my mind, vivid snippets that always make me cry.

It's been a while. I said that at the start of my last post. And now it's been four months. Yikes! Shame on me. Part of what's been keeping me from posting is the ever growing gap in time between my last post and this one. As the time continues to increase, I've been feeling more pressure to produce a post that would be amazing and make it worth the wait for my readers. Today I feel that pressure more than ever, but I'm not going to let it continue to stall me. No promises on knocking your socks off with this post though.

So what have I been doing for the past four months? The short answer is, a lot. But in keeping with the theme of my blog, I'll tell you that I haven't really been running. How can one blog about running when one isn't running? I've been asking myself this all summer. I've also been obsessing about the condition of my (still) injured hip, something I believe I was obsessing about in my last post. I wanted to come back to my blog high on endorphins from running. But that's still not my reality.

It's been a while. It seems that during the final weeks of the semester, I don't have time for much else other than school, no matter how much I plan and prepare. But summer vacation has officially begun. That should mean more time spent writing.

So, I haven't been running because of my hip. Instead I've been doing yoga, though I've been rather cautious with that as well. In my last post, I decided to cease all exercise. That lasted about two weeks, when I decided that yoga should be good for my hip, but that I would have to be smarter about it. I would have to be tuned into my body, specifically my hips. I don't know why this didn't occur to me sooner. Isn't that what yoga is all about, tuning into your body and what it's saying?

Kara Goucher recently posted to her blog about a new injury, a "sacral stress fracture" that will have her on crutches and on the sidelines for a while. Injury is perhaps one of the most frustrating parts of running, or any athletic activity that one enjoys doing.

I've been training for a marathon since the beginning of January and I haven't been on a long run since February because of an injury. This all started when I began to notice that my right hamstring seemed strained. I feared my body was digressing back to where it was in April of 2010, about three weeks before my first marathon. Then, I pulled my hamstring on my longest training run, twenty-two miles through the quite neighborhoods of Fargo, North Dakota. I remember exactly when it happened. My running partner, Ingrid, and I were about nineteen miles into that twenty-two mile run when I felt a small snap of pain right were my gluteus met my hamstring. I didn't think much of it. New body parts constantly hurt on long runs and I had learned to run through nearly any kind of pain. Plus, we were only a 5k away from finishing twenty-two miles. I could run a 5k in any condition (something I still believe, though I'm starting to see that I shouldn't run a 5k in any condition). So I finished the run, did some stretches and went about the rest of my day.

That was three weeks before the marathon. I had been looking forward to the taper, two easy weeks of running to finish preparing my body for a marathon. Instead, I struggled through two or three pathetic and painful runs and went to the chiropractor as often as he would let me. I iced my hamstring and whined to my parents, my best friend, and anyone else who would listen. I cried at the thought of having to drop out of the race.

I think one of the first lessons I learned in an undergraduate creative writing class was how ineffective certain rhetorical moves can be. For example, dream sequences don't tend to sit well with readers. You write a fantastical and elaborate story where the protagonist overcomes insurmountable odds, and you end the story by having her wake up from a vivid dream. Does anyone remember that Adam Sandler movie "Click"? Yeah, it doesn't really work. The reader feels cheated.

I also remember learning that it's also not effective to create an unnecessary amount of drama in a piece of writing. Drama for the sake of drama. This might look something like starting a scene on a bright and sunny day where birds are chirping and all is merry (cliche, yeah, but stay with me), only to turn it all around and have the sky suddenly dump down a snowstorm (sure, it could happen, but what's the point of this drama?). I know that was a terrible example, but hopefully you get the point.

Everyone seems to be looking for a quick fix, or at least marketing companies seem to think we all are. I've subscribed to Women's Health Magazine for a handful of years now. In general, I enjoy the magazine. They offer what I believe to be valuable health tips. There's also a bit of sex appeal: a few articles in the magazine on the act itself as well as attractive celebrities on the cover who are, for the most part, women I'm interested in reading about. So it's like Cosmopolitan, but not as slutty. Women's Health seems to be acknowledging that sex sells and also saying that, "sex is healthy." All in all, their audience awareness appears to be spot on. But more and more, there's something about the magazine that I find troubling. Let's take a look back at some of the cover rhetoric over the past few months:

Everyone's talking about the weather and I want to get involved. Apparently there's a salt shortage throughout New England. The Boston Globe has called it "The Great Salt Shortage of 2014." And according to them, Connecticut has declared this to be an emergency and New Jersey has started using pickle juice on the roads.

Hey N.E., how about we stop misusing the words emergency and storm?