Here We Go Again

We all know the drill. Never give up! The secret to success is to pick ourselves up when we fall down and try, try again.

I mentioned my wish to run again – just 4-5 miles a day – not too far, but far enough to give me a few more calories to play with, and maybe a better behind. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now, but so far I haven’t taken myself seriously enough to make it happen.

The beauty of a blog is that even if only a handful of people read your stuff, someone is bound to be paying attention. Accountability for the win!

Any of you who followed me over from Datergurl might remember the January when, full of Holiday grog and plenty of baked goods and sugar, I decided to become a ballerina. I didn’t expect to be recruited by a company or anything, but I planned to gun it for my toe shoes.

I took class twice a week, and I was pretty good at the barre. The floor was a whole other ball of yarn.. I was not much of a leaper or a twirler; I had vertigo and was chunky in a way that made getting off the ground a bit of an engineering problem. The whole thing was pretty disorienting, especially since I grew up leaping and twirling with ease.

Eventually life happened and I quit class. I never did end up en pointe or anywhere even close but I did develop excellent posture and I dropped fifteen pounds. The thing is, when you are a ballerina in your head, you stand up tall and you eat really really well.

When I ran my half marathon for Team In Training, I was already doing ultramarathons in my mind by the third week. I’m a little delusional like that.

I also mentioned already that I’ve been slowing down and losing muscle and function and the normal rallying I might usually muster was thwarted by Covid slothiness. My weight didn’t change but something nuts happened to my body. And it took me some time to notice.

I began to suffer from an interesting syndrome I call SFTDL ( Single For Too Damn Long.) I’ll talk about the upside of SFTDL later but right now I’m here to air my dirty laundry. So here’s the slacker side of it. Without kids or a partner I developed the questionable habit of coming home, feeding the animals and then getting into bed to read and watch stuff on my laptop. Some nights I fell down a Tic Tok rabbit hole, some nights I watched high brow documentaries, and sometimes I binged on The Voice.

I’d space out and enjoy the no-demands aspect of being flat on my back so much that I often stayed up until 12 or 1 a.m. – prone, and happy as a clam.

In an act of self-care, I moved my work start time to 10 a.m. but with the late nights I didn’t really feel any more room in my mornings. I was waking around 8:30 or 9, showering, watering the yard, feeding the animals and – off to work.

So what’s the big problem? Well first off, I sometimes spent thirteen hours a day in bed. I know that’s outrageous but there was nobody to complain and I wasn’t hurting a soul so who cares. I mean I could have forced myself to remain upright but I was tired and I didn’t wanna.

Fast forward to now and I do have a problem. I want to do too many things to sleep through my mornings, work all day and spend my evenings flat on my back. For a long time I was happy enough with my lunchtime hike but over time I still wasn’t fitting in Spanish, ceramics, blogging, violin or weight-training. I did get back to gardening so yay to that.

So, today I ran. From the outside I might have looked like a fluffy little hobbit bobbing up and down, but I got my heart rate up for a good thirty minutes and my butt feels tight so I know I did something good.

As I recall from the last time I did this, if you just keep going you get stronger and stronger and you can go longer and longer. In my case I never got much faster though. I’m so slow that well-meaning friends have asked me if I’m sure I’m not walking. My friends are a bunch of smart-asses.

I’m gonna show you a picture because today was super beautiful and also to prove to you that I really did do the dang thing, and uphill at that.

*

It’s now about 8:42 in the P.M. and I am going to attempt to do something really outrageous. I am going to try to stay up until about 10:30 – and by up I mean upright in this living room. And then (and this is when Sh*t gets crazy) – I’m going to bed without my laptop or my phone or any type of screen. I know this is pretty radical but I want to see if I can do it.

And then I want to see if I can wake up at 7 a.m. feeling rested.

I will report back tomorrow, because I know I am not the only one suffering from SFTDL. I know plenty of us have developed less than wonderful habits and when they stop serving us it’s time to bust out and try something different.

I regret that this post sounds like a bunch of ideas inspired by Oprah magazine, but Oprah isn’t wrong. She’s just sort of annoying in her constant push to make us better actualized humans. Mostly I don’t want to be reminded to stretch beyond my comfort zone. I’m pushing 60, dammit.

But this is different in a really move it or lose it kind of way. I don’t want to be a complete apple – that’s my vanity talking – and I do want to see if I can get up earlier so I can maybe play some fiddle or conjugate a few verbs en español.

I’m a little pissy atm because I’m a bit hungry and I am sober as the day I was born. More on that later but I made myself a mocktail and I need to just cool it and wind down because in my mind I am now a bit of a waif, and an artist like Edie Sedgewick, minus the overdose. Or Lillie Mae. I’m her and Lillie looks like she doesn’t eat for fun after 7pm.

I have already started rimming my eyes a little darker so clearly, the sky’s the limit.

Sweet dreams, monkey love and wish me luck.