Lessons from a Foam Block

It's a funny thing about noise.  As a 47 year old mom of five, I think I have honed my selective hearing skills.  There are my school aged kids playing  a game, or running through the house.  My middle schooler knee deep in an online/cellphone game of Minecraft with his buddy, and my 21 year old with complaints about college professors or his work schedule.  My work life is no different.  In the ER, we have monitors going off, phones ringing, yelling drunks, essentially a whole other set of noise I have learned to selectively tune out.  However, there is another set of noise that is a bit more challenging.  That is the noise that exists in my own mind.  Those nagging thoughts that remind me of all of the things I need to get done on an off day like I had Sunday.  It was my only day off, day four of a seven day stretch containing six ten hour shifts otherwise.

There is the laundry, groceries, tasks related to my business, school projects that really involve me more than the two kids that had them, getting the house in order for the two days I had to work following that, not to mention trying to reintroduce myself to my children in a meaningful way after working a long stretch on the heels of being out of town.  Interwoven into all of this is the stressors of life's unanswered questions served up in the low lying nagging grief  associated with the sudden death of my mom a few months ago.  This is the noise that it is a little harder to be selective about.

Despite all of these things, I have a race in three weeks.  The Fenway Spartan Sprint.  As team captain, with a team of predominantly newbie racers, my training still needs to be consistent, and the tightness and soreness of my right hamstring told me a trip to yoga was probably the best step that day.  Besides, my 21 year old happened to be home and he was feeling a stretch today too.  I have to admit, I am not generally a yoga person.  I tend to take my stress and go balls out on the rower, or lift something heavy, which is quite a change from my younger days, when coping looked more like food.  Nonetheless, yoga, for me is the place to stretch and lengthen, the balance the soreness associated with balls out workouts.  Admittedly, I do choose to wear yoga pants with skulls on them hidden in a floral print to show I am really more badass Spartan racer, and a little less yogi.

What met us in the studio today, was the usual heat associated with the Baptiste style we go to.  There truly is something helpful about more than 90 degree heat to stretch out tight hamstrings even if it does mean saturating the microfiber towel that covers my mat. As class got started we downward dogged and reclined our warrior with the best of them and just got moving through the flow.  It was about this time the class changed. We were asked to use a yoga block.  This brown 4in x 6 in x 9 in block of  foam was to be our focus, or "drishti" in yoga speak.  Every movement we did we were not to take our eye off this block.  Forward fold, downward dog, chair pose, so many others....  I began to notice my block had a small scrape, an abrasion really.  My brain took note of the dimensions, 1cm x 3cm.  Being in medicine for as long as I have, with a large part of what I do being laceration repair,  means estimating abrasions and lacerations is as ingrained in me as breathing at this point. As I pondered this and the depth of said abrasion my body was moving. Up and down, balance, breathe, don't take your eye off the block... Over and over until it dawned on me the movement and drishti had silenced the noise that ran over my whole brain most of the day. I began to think about how many times I probably let my own concerns over life's unanswered questions stop me from truly moving through the flow of life. That nondescript brown abraded block had suddenly become the sound absorber to my otherwise chronically busy noisy brain teaching me that sometimes, turning the noise off opens up new possibilities for forward motion.  Pretty soon, the movements of Sunday's flow seemed to be coming from somewhere other than stretching a tight hamstrings.

My son and I would emerge from the studio, refreshed and ready to take on my personal challenge of crafting an epic Sunday dinner.  This is my throw down to myself on the Sundays I am off.  With my Green Egg lit, my butterfly chops marinaded and my wireless speaker going, I was deep in the throws of chopping sweet potatoes when I became suddenly aware of the lyrics coming from the speaker.  The Eagles would give me the gentle reminder to "take it easy, don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy."  Yes, guilty as charged, and advice well needed.   Tomorrow, after my balls out Orangetheory workout,  I will go to yoga, perhaps  this time a little less badass and a little more yogi.  Somehow I think that stack of brown blocks in the corner will look entirely different.

Castle on the Hill - 30 Year Reunion

There is something wholly appropriate about Ed Sheeran releasing,"Castle on the Hill" this year.  Those of us who grew up in Glen Ellyn, IL, a western suburb of Chicago have always referred to our high school Glenbard West, as the Castle on the Hill, so why not have the song released just in time for our 30 year reunion this past weekend.  The school is a beautiful place resembling a European castle somehow placed in the middle of the Chicago suburbs.  To an outsider, it may seem a bit out of place, or even odd, however, to us alumni it just looks like home.  

Thirty years.  That is not a short amount of time, at least by most standards, however, those of us this weekend might argue that point, as in a lot of ways it seems like the blink of an eye.  The reality was I was excited to see my friends, but with that excitement came the baggage of being brought up in a family of overweight adults, and me, an overweight child with a long history of bullying and failures in the physical realm. Last to be picked for teams in elementary school and first to be snickered at in gym class when there was little chance I could keep up with my peers.  Not this weekend though.  I got to go back as an emergency room nurse practitioner who works in two emergency rooms and three urgent cares.  I started a motivational health and fitness company this year after finally learning to be healthy, and that seemed to be going well. I was a badass Spartan racer who no longer attracted ridicule for my inability to climb Hernia Hill in junior high. I had run the 20 mile Spartan Beast up and down the mountains of West Virginia just one month ago.  Hell, I had successfully resusitated a guy on an airplane two years ago and I even had tattoos.  I was hardly the shy, fat girl who lacked any semblance of confidence who emerged from here in 1987.Yet there it was, leading up to the weekend, that emotional space that my brain occupied between the chip on my shoulder of who I had become and the crazy underconfidence of where I come from.  

What greeted me this weekend, however, was hardly what I expected.  Yes, I loved the time I had with my friends, many of them now my clients, but it was the people I was not friends with growing up who surprised me the most.  It would seem the clique lines really no longer existed.  Those had died with the fat underconfident girl that I used to be.  We were moms, dads, professionals, all successful in our own rights.  We had scattered all over the world.  However, this weekend we clung to a group of people who so wholeheartedly understood where we all came from in a way outsiders could not totally grasp.  We were home.  

We drank too much, unleashed the rebellious badasses we had all become at some point of our youth, but have had to tuck away for some time, and enjoyed the escape from our respective day to day adult realities. Old friendships were renewed, and new ones forged between, what we would have thought years ago to be, unlikely matches.  We grieved the loss of former classmates who had gone before us and realized just how short life is.   We found ourselves so much closer over the course of two days and completely in mourning as it all came to end.  We are all now realizing there is absolutely no way we can wait another ten years, opting now for two.  

I would spend my morning Sunday before my trip to the airport driving around Glen Ellyn.   I became acutely aware of the loss of my mom earlier this summer, and suddenly grateful to her for insisting we grow up here.  She must have seen the beauty that I see today all those years ago.  Yes, I would find myself listening to Ed Sheeran as it was only fitting, and as I trek it back to upstate New York, all I have to say is until next time Glen Ellyn, take care of the Castle on the Hill as, I can't wait to come home.

Finding a Unicorn in a Sea of Color

As of late, there seems to be some sort of crazy obsession with unicorns.  I guess I don't really understand the cult like popularity of the mythical creature. A fake horse with a big horn.  Seems a little bit out there.  Nonetheless, it has taken over everything from makeup to apparel to a rather controversial drink at Starbucks.  Nonetheless, the color palate of pink, blue, yellow and purple seems to be the thing that identifies something as "unicorny" in modern pop culture.  I was thinking about that as I passed through the welcome arch of Color Me Rad today, with their seeming representation, perhaps unintentional, of the one horned wonder horse.  There was something a bit surreal about standing in the festival area splashed with these colors on a 37 degree morning waiting for the 5k to start.  I found my thoughts going back to the last time I stood on this spot.  It was two years ago.  I was preparing for a 5k I was not totally sure I could do.  It was only my second in my life, and the first was a mere weeks before and quite different.  It had been the Insane Inflatable 5K.  That race was easy.  I could use the obstacles as rest periods and never really ran more than a quarter mile.  However, running a sustained 5k without stopping, that was something I was not altogether sure of. 

By that point, I was ten months into my weight loss journey, and only 6 months into my Orangetheory Training and I suppose by then I could wear the term "jogger" loosely.  Yes, I had lost 55 pounds by then, but my left hip hurt.  I would find out many months later it was a stress fracture from the very activity I would try to do that day.  I had not really run in weeks by then,"preparing".  I had instead chosen the bike.  With all of this worry, plus my history of gym class bullying due to my obesity and inability to keep up, I was a bit of a wreck at the start line.  However, I took off with my son, Jack.  My very patient trusty sidekick, who jogged at my slow pace and walked when the hills hurt too much to run on.  We did it.  It may not have been graceful or lightning fast but we did it.  Just about the time I was frustrated with certain aspects of the run, and a bit shaken with the battle of the hip pain, I found my guy had posted this.  When I look at this picture, I see all of the insecurities I wore at the time and recall the uncertainty of a hip that had honestly hurt for two  months by then.  However, these words would remind me I had made a promise to this guy when he left for college.  This was a promise that I would finally get healthy, and he had become invested in supporting me through it.  Time to press on.

To be honest, I had forgotten a lot of that until I was standing on that spot again today.  This time, my hip didn't hurt, I had a titanium compression screw and a well healed fracture that took care of that.  I was no longer a somewhat "jogger" at Orangetheory, I was teetering on the brink of "runner," and after doing a 20 mile Spartan in August I was pretty sure I could cover the distance. So, those aspects of today's race were covered.  Now, to conquer one more fear.  Once again, I was with runners that were faster than me.  That proved to be mentally devastating at my last 5k in June as my irrational fear of being last, leftover from tough junior high and high school days, reared its ugly head. Today,  I found myself pulling the other runners on my team aside and explaining to them, that me slowing them down was just my fear, and that the only one who cared about that was me, as they did not.  They of course, laughed at me and once again said, the pace did not matter.  We run together a lot and truly this did not need to be said. I think I was just trying to convince myself once again, simply running this 5k with my team mattered and nothing more. 

As we took off in the sea of humanity,  I found myself on a familiar course only, I was not the runner I was two years ago.  I seemed to be running without pain.  I took on the hills and pushed away the voices that love to tell me,"I can't" and did it anyway this time perhaps a bit more gracefully than the last time, as this time my running mates did not have to say,"you got this" even once.  As I chatted with my team, we joked about this being an agility course as we found ourselves weaving in and out of the walls of walkers enjoying the sunny day and the excited crowd.  We would find ourselves in color stations where the corn starch based color hung so heavy in the air, we could not see the runners a foot in front of us.  We would laugh about having to call out to one another in the middle of a cloud of purple and would have to blow the dust off the sunglasses before we could get going again.  It became obvious in the passing of two years, that although the course was familiar, my experience was all new. Fear and anxiety was replaced by laughter, and the hip pain replaced by the ability to run some hills.

Pretty soon, I would hear Jack say,"wait.  What?  We're done?"  There it was, the finish, already.  I found myself speeding up for a strong finish, with the voice of my favorite trainer playing in my head,"take it home guys.  Take it home."  Due to the crowded course it would take about 34 minutes for us.  Not super speedy, but certainly a comfortable 5k for me.  We would go on to join the after party that involved a lot of dancing, and color bombs for days.

 I began to really reflect on the last two years.  The agony of a broken leg with a long recovery, the unadulterated happiness associated with completing the 20 mile Spartan Beast and everything in between.  I began to wonder what would have happened if someone told me when I started all of this, nearly three years ago, that it would take this long and be a winding road full of hills and battles. Would I say it was just too hard? I had given up many times in the past, why wouldn't I give up then?  Three years.  Devastating injury.  Tough surgery.  Hard recovery, and the uphill battle of the 85 pound weight loss staring me in the face, ready go. Knowing that up front probably would have made me believe that it was about as possible as seeing a mythical unicorn in Saratoga today.  Yet, a total of nearly three years, a team of people not willing to let me fall, mostly my sidekick Jack, and I find myself learning a little more about myself with each passing race, and today embracing the pink, purple, yellow and blue culture with the best of them actually beginning to wonder what horned creature lived in the billows of color, proving that at times good health may seem as likely as a unicorn in Saratoga, but not impossible.