run

Free Run, Day 16

Saturday, October 21st 2023 

POST-RUN MORTUM

Time Running: 41:45

Distance Achieved: 3.11 miles

Tunage: Hadestown 

Not fucking bad if I do say so myself. 

This run had me emotional. Like, on the brink of tears a few times emotional. That’s never happened to me before. I think it was from a combination of a lot of things. Firstly, the last few weeks have been a fucking emotional roller coaster. High highs, low lows, and I think I’m still sort of decompressing from and unpacking all of that. Secondly, I’ve missed this. The rest has been good, I can admit that now, sitting here writing this after essentially running a 5K, and my knee and leg aren’t throbbing, but I missed being out there. I missed the routine. I missed the feeling of being outside and moving my body like this. Of knowing that I can move my body like this. That, I think, is the most surprising part of all of this. How much I enjoy the actual running. WHO WOULD HAVE THUNK?! Certainly not I. 

Which brings me to my thirdly. I think, and again, I’ll deny ever having written this if pressed, I think I’m like, really fucking proud of myself. 

Now, for someone in the arts, for someone who relies heavily on outside validation, you would think that feeling pride is something that I know intimately. And you would be incorrect. It takes a lot for me to look at something I’ve done, to objectively take a step back and assess it and to see anything other than what could have been better, what more I could have done. So, feeling pride, like, internally and within myself, ESPECIALLY from something I’ve done physically, isn’t really something I experience often. But fuck it if the “Wait For Me” reprise didn’t come on, and I didn’t go into a full ass sprint and felt literally full-body chills for what I was doing. It was wild. I was wild. And in control. And fucking strong. 

I don’t know, y’all. I know I’ve said that a lot during this process, but it’s because this process keeps surprising me. It keeps finding new ways to make me go, holy shitl, I didn’t know I was capable of doing that. And a lot of the time, it’s because I’ve been told I shouldn’t be capable of doing something and I believed those voices. And there is a lot of anger and shame and residual shit that needs to get flushed the fuck out of me for believing those voices for so long. 

And listen, I’m not saying I’ll never let a negative thought into my head, but I think today, sprinting along the Riverside Drive overpass with the wind at my back and a blue sky, lazy with puffy clouds before me, I think that became a little bit of a core memory. And it should be. Because it felt amazing. And it felt like me. 

Wow. 

Ok, cool.

That’s all I have for you today. 

T-minus-eight days until the big run. Let’s fucking go.