My World in Words
Welcome to my blog, the place I try to put my inner world into words, aiming to share wisdom gained through experience, hope, mistakes, and everything that makes life both beautiful and messy.
FYI - Posts will appear haphazardly and on no set schedule other than the one life sets out for me. Things get a little chaotic at times, but I will always return eventually.
Forget balance. Life is in the extremes.
Yes there is a give and take to everything in life and all aspects such as family, friends, career, study etc needs time dedicated to it for healthy functioning. But that doesn't mean every day or even every week has to address every one of these pillars of life. The way I see it, if you have more than two main focuses at once, you are juggling, not balancing. At some point you won't be able to catch the ball thats in the air and it will hit the ground hard.
Australian Mountain Running Championships 2019
8 days out, the Saturday before the race, was where I freaked out. I was home alone, getting ready for race week and trying to organise my travel to Queensland, when it all hit me at once. My longest run in the last 5 months up until that point was 12km, and the race was 14km up and down a bloody mountain. I sat, breathed, meditated, and ate chocolate peanut butter as I tried to reframe my thoughts.
Own your story, but don't resign to it.
The journey from hiding every tear to not at all being ashamed of crying in the most public of places and letting everyone know exactly where I am weakest was not a short one; and it came with its fair amount of detriments and failures along the way. Thinking back, I have been sharing parts of my journey and trying to be 'open' for years, but it is only in the past year or so that sharing has become a holistically healing path. I was first interviewed for an educational TV program back in 2014, and my instagram dates back to before that with what can seem to be openness and truth. Which it was, I hid nothing and was not scared to share the depths of what I was going through, but the motivation for that sharing and the effect it had on me were very different to my motivation and the resulting effects today.
The 'Adjustment Period' of Running.
The way I see it, running is like the opposite of a relationship. When you start out with a new partner, you enter the honeymoon period filled with love and excitement and immediately get rose coloured glasses firmly planted over your eyes. It seems like everything is blissfully perfect, until somewhere along the path cracks start to show. With running on the other hand, there's no way around the fact that in many ways the start sucks. Not only is breathing scarily difficult, sweat more abundant, and heart rates sky high; but you get to become reacquainted with the pain of muscles microtearing and fixing themselves on a daily basis. For me, this has meant waking up being unable to walk without the pressure and pain in my calves forcing me into a robot shuffle for the first 5 minutes of the day. Navigating stairs has once again become a mission of sweet talking my quads and hamstrings into moving as they are designed to, and I am drop-dead tired most nights.