Finding the Balance

Anyone who has known me has often heard me say that the hardest thing in life is finding a balance. Whether that balance is between work and play, family and friends, selling and servicing (in my particular career), etc. And this holiday weekend, my challenge was to find the balance between fitness and family. Both vitally important to my well-being!

Sometimes you have to alter your goals and plans to accommodate those around you. If the sun would come up a wee bit earlier, it would help immensely. Since I am not able to influence that heavenly body, or any other, there are only so many hours in the day to achieve my plans.

Thus I had to cut my "long" run a "little" short on Saturday and do 8 miles instead of 10. Now, I could have chosen to get to the preserve before my friends and do two extra miles in the dark. This did not seem smart. Or, I could have chosen to ditch my friends and do 10 miles at home on the treadmill. Dear God, that would be beastly. Or I could have chosen to ditch the run altogether and do it on my own on Sunday.

This last option was certainly tempting when I got up at 6:00 on Saturday...and everything hurt me. This is a common experience that everything hurts when I wake up. And some mornings it is truly discouraging. This past Saturday was one of those mornings. When you have to try three times to bend over to get one shoe on, you know it is going to be tough going. It only took two tries to get the other shoe on. And when I straightened up, already I was feeling better. A tip to any of you who suffer from lower back pain: sitting on the second step to do this grisly task is helpful, especially if you then raise the darn foot to the first step for the insertion and tying of the shoe.

Also psychologically helpful is if you have shoes which you love to look at. My current running shoes are a fantastic, fabulous purple. They make me smile just to look at them. I should take a photo of them and post here, perhaps they will make you smile as well. It is not possible to look at these shoes and want to sit still!!

But I digress. Back to my options Saturday morning. The best option was to see my dear friends and cut the run short to meet my other obligations for the day. I am blessed that they also were willing to cut it short and so I had company for the whole 8 miles instead of just the 4 out and would have had to do the return 4 on my own. A word about these most special women: Dana and Lauren. They are far better women than I am. Most Saturdays, I show up talking smack about paces, distances, negative splits and I'm the task master of sorts. They are pretty happy to just be out there, enjoying the morning, no worries if the second half takes longer than the first or we don't hit a target for the day. And if they are feeling sluggish, I'd leave them in a NY minute. This week, I was struggling to keep up with them, not for a moment did they think about leaving me behind...like I said...better buddies than me. I am lucky!!!

So, I did the 8 instead of the 10. I felt like I was cheating, but I know it was the right thing to do. After that I went about my day with other girlfriends, returning just in time to decide I was too exhausted to make dinner. So I really didn't see my family all day. Which is why I chose not to run the Sunken Meadow race on Sunday. I had really been looking forward to it. But it would have been another large time commitment to get all the way there and back. So again, finding the balance, I ran 4 miles at home to be true to my training, but not be gone forever to be true to my daughter.

After all, there were Junior Banquet dresses to be shopped for!!!

Today was the best of the three days as far as my training goes. Naturally, you should be expecting it to be a swim story. I love the swim. I love everything about the swim. The feel of the water as I glide through it. The sound of the bubbles. The sight of the tiles on the bottom of the pool and the flags above the pool. I even love the smell of the chlorine. Not so much the taste of the chlorine, so we will leave that sense out of the discussion.

After taking 3 months off from swimming, I have just returned recently. The shoulder is not 100% and I have been using fins as an aid to stress the shoulder less. Today I went without fins for quite a while. I was tired, that's for sure, but it didn't feel too bad. So I think I might just be able to return to my previous level of performance in due time. This was tremendously encouraging. Careful not to overdo it, I got out when they were ready to start the fast swimming sets...that would have been too much for sure...but ohhhhh, how I love to race....soon, I hope soon I will be able to swim harder.

Patience is not a virtue I have been blessed with. Maybe I'll write about that some day... :)