Learning from the Desperation for the Sixty-four Pack

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as the internet or really even a computer.  That would come later when I was in junior high and we got the latest Commodore Vic 20 with a cassette drive and green screen.  Nope, when I was a young school age kid we relied on things like smelly markers and fancy papers or Rockem Sockem Robots for our entertainment.  Possibly the biggest thing I remember about those days was being six and the months leading into Christmas that year.  All I wanted was a Crayola 64 Pack with a built in sharpener.  Oh yes.  I would not only have colors like burnt sienna or cerulean, but my crayons would never be dull again.  I would be capable of magical art work that would live on forever.  I spent weeks dropping the phrase "A Crayola 64 Pack with a built in sharpener" into absolutely every conversation.  I was so desperate for those life changing crayons that I was not going to miss an opportunity to get them. 

Well, as it turned out, Christmas came and went and I did not get them.  I couldn't tell you what I actually got, but I will say this,  I have yet, despite being 48, to live down that period of time.  To this day my siblings still bring up from time to time that I "harbor resentment over the 64 pack"  following this statement by one of my siblings is a pause as their eyes meet and all in unison say,"with the built in sharpener"  followed by gales of laughter. Yes, my crayon desperation has failed to die despite the 42 years that have passed.

Earlier this week, I spent some time talking to a motivational client.  She had her own desperation to see a particular number on the scale, however medical issues are preventing easy weight loss right now.  I began to recall my multi decade desperation for the same thing.  In life, I wanted two things from early on.  I wanted to be thin and I wanted to be a runner.  I had an idealistic number on the scale I wanted to be.  I was desperate to be there.  I did commercial diet after commercial diet.  It all ended the same way.  I would hit a plateau, chuck the process because clearly in  my mind it was not working, and then resign myself to failure.  When no diet could get me there, I decided to give pills a try. I had reached my lifetime maximum of 296 and was beyond desperate.   I had just moved to Dayton and found a weight loss physician in the yellow pages.  I would go to his office, but often he was not there.  A secretary would have me sign a book and hand me some shakes and a bottle of pills and off I would go.  That process did start to work but the doctor showed up less and less and on my last visit as I finally just left without seeing him, the secretary would call my cell to tell me he would meet me in the parking lot in just ten minutes if I could wait.  He pulled up in a rusted out van and handed me amphetamines from his front seat.  This was a brand new low in dieting desperation for even me.  Yes, he was a physician.  Yes, he was licensed to prescribe these, but there was probably a reason he had a supply of diet pills and was comfortable treating patients from a rusted out van.  It resembled a popular SNL skit featuring Chris Farley at the time. A couple years later, this same person would end up prosecuted for questionable prescribing practices and lose his license to practice medicine. Nonetheless,  my desperation never really ended, and ultimately would lead me to the business end of a scalpel.  I was still chasing the number I had in my head since I was a teenager, only now I was 35.  That too would work for a time, and yes I would see the magical number, for a short period of time.

In my quest to be a runner, I would watch my classmates run their six minute miles blowing past my coughing and wheezing obese self.  I wanted it to be easy like it seemed to be for them.   I can recall awakening the morning I was to run the Cooper, that fateful day in junior high.  In our school, that was a fancy name for running a mile and a half on a specific trail around the school.  We did this dreaded task about twice a year.  It proved to be misery for an obese child like me. I was last, sweaty and pretty sure I would never breathe again.  That did not stop me from waking up that morning and just convincing myself that day it would be different.  That day it would easy for me.  I would go and run and ignore the discomfort.  It never ended that way.  I would be a sweaty mess wheezing for the following two days with sore legs and not try again until the next time.

How many times do we take desperation for a number or physcial achievement and do crazy things to get what we want, or ignore the work we actually need to do and try to find a shortcut, just because we have convinced ourselves that if we had that one thing, life would be entirely different. The reality is, our well being does not come from a color like cerulean, a magical fix from a guy in a rusted out van or the shear will to overcome work that has not been done.  As I explained to my client, yes, I finally did reach that number on the scale, but what I learned along the way is it is not that magical number that gives us what it is we are so desperate for.  Our true well being will come more from the process.  I challenged her to put clean things in her body, exercise within the confines of her health issues, and most importantly put the number on the scale away and get a manicure, as those things will feed her soul and provide more satisfaction than any number.  In fact, doing what is best for ourselves amidst frustrating limitations, is likely way more rewarding than any number.

As for me, and my desperation to be a runner....    I have spent three years, with time off for a hip fracture, slowly working.  I began as a walker at 3.6 miles an hour.  Little by little, a day at a time, slowly building.  I had my eye on the chart at Orangetheory.  To be considered officially a runner you had to run at 5.5 mph as a base pace, meaning no slower through the interval blocks.  I had so many fails.   My desperation to be a runner as soon as possible after my hip fracture two years ago, would push me to go too fast, deciding a given day was the day. I was going to do it.  Nope.  I had to walk.  Months of giving in to desperation to be a runner got me not getting anywhere and making no progress to be faster.  I finally broke down and asked my trainer, how was I ever going to get faster.  The answer was tough.  Slow it down.  Build from there.  I had to take the humbling step to see I was not really where I thought I was.  I really wasn't close to being the actual runner just because I could do the 5.5 for short periods of time.  The reality was, I had to slow my base pace to a 5.1 to be able to maintain it and build.  I had to slow it all down and be patient. Once again, they were right.  Put desperation away and start at the bottom.  Today, two months after that advice,  I made it 5.5mph, officially a runner 48 years in the  making.  Learning once again desperation breeds failure, slow positive motion breeds success.   

Did I ever get that 64 pack?  I did.  In 1999, two things happened.  I turned 30 and was working as a nurse finishing my master's degree.  I would take my hard earned money to purchase the 50th Anniversary Edition of the 64 pack.  It came in fancy Christmas tin with an ornament that also was a crayon sharpener, that still hangs on my tree each year.  Somehow the cerulean in that pack was just a little bit brighter than my six year old mind had pictured, and the container would hold a place of prominence in my home for years to come.  Watching my 5 and 3 year old at the time, who had been adopted from Russia almost three years earlier,  after years of infertility, color with those very crayons brought a whole different dimension of satisfaction that would never have been appreciated had I received the crayons at the age of six.  It just goes to show that the things we think we are most immediately desperate for can often turn into something totally different and way more amazing than we ever dreamed.  The best is truly yet to come. 

 

Attacking Ten Acres of Fire with a Garden Hose, Fighting Fear in New Ways

In my adult life, I have moved several times.  I have lived in a total of 5 states for extended periods of time, but most people who know me understand my standard line is,"I am just a simple girl from Chicago."  Chicago is my home, and summers in Chicago is still some of my most coveted times in life. I am a child of the 80's and grew up in the western suburbs.  In the summertime, I would play long games of kick the can with the kids in the neighborhood until the street lights came on, which, as anyone can tell you, was the universal sign to go home.   There would be some crazy hot days where we would wait for the fire hydrant on the street to be opened and we could play in the water as the steam rolled off the asphalt.  Yes, suburban life.

Imagine my culture shock in 1999, when we moved to rural Ohio.  I found myself moving into a very small subdivision in the country directly across the cornfield from some other family.  I suppose the omen of a previous visit should have tipped me off that I was not in Chicago anymore.  I was on one of my previous attempts at fitness.  I decided I would jog the rural roads of what would come to be my home later on.  As I jogged/walked along the double rail fence of a neighboring farm, let us not forget, I was obese at the time and far from a true runner.  Nonetheless, I spent that time basking in the scenery.  The green grass, the rolling hills and I could even see the cows grazing in the distance and was thinking maybe rural living was not so bad.  That was until a cow came trotting toward the fence, another followed, pretty soon the whole herd was running at me and the only thing between me and them were two small slats of wood.  Not even an electric fence. A dozen or more cows stampeding toward this city girl.  I ran faster and faster, and I will say, in that circumstance I take no responsibility for what came out of my mouth in that moment.  Eventually, I would reach the end of the property where the corner of the fence was and they would simply stop as if nothing had happened.  

Despite all of that terror,  we moved there anyway, as family proved to outweigh stampeding cows.  On moving day, we had a system.  Unload boxes, load them up, drive them to our family's seven acre property and toss them on the bonfire.  It made it easier, no huge piles of trash.  Hmmm.... this wasn't so bad.  In Chicago, we would have had multiple trips to the dump. This was faster.  We had started the process the night before. The following morning, the fire was still a slow burn so we picked up where we left off.  The problem was, the winds had picked up and somehow in the mayhem of the day, some of the embers had blown into the already harvested corn field that surrounded our family's land and started a fire.  A family member called the fire department and would start to attack the wall of flames with a garden hose.  It was no use, the corn stalks were dry and the wind was strong.  Before long, there was a wall of flames creeping along the ten acre field.  Suddenly, I would think about where they would plug into a fire hydrant.  Wait.  Was there a fire hydrant?  They had to have hydrants, right?   The answer was no.  This area was well and septic.  No water lines.  

A fire truck would arrive, but it wasn't a water truck.  Now I was in a small panic.  How far would this fire go? Out of the fire truck, a small team of rural firefighters would jump out with straw brooms and begin to start at the outside edges of the fire beating back the flames.  I remember saying out loud,"what do they think that is gonna do?"  In fact, I was pretty sure the brooms would catch fire too.  Pretty soon, the local farmer would show up with his combine.  OK really?  Was he going to run over the fire with his diesel powered farm equipment? In my mind, we needed water, not a team of misfits with  dollar store brooms and a combine.  Yet there seemed to be no water truck.  The whole scene was comical on the one hand, but on the other, I honestly began to wonder if it would hit the farm house at the other end of the field.  

Pretty soon, I would realize the guy on the combine was plowing rows beyond the fire burying the dry cornstalks into wet mud so the fire could go no further. The guys with the brooms seemed to be containing the fire that was headed for the treeline.  Wait.  This band of misfits maybe did know exactly what they were doing and the person who didn't get it was the white girl from Chicago who just assumed fire hydrants existed everywhere and this was how to do things.  Pretty soon the guy on the combine would come close enough to point at us city folk and laugh as he plowed a row closest to us.  For years to come the city folk burning down ten acres of farmland would be the thing of legend in our small town.  

Reflecting on this experience makes me think about how many times we make a resolution to lose weight or get healthy only to find that we are facing the proverbial ever expanding wall of fire armed with a simple garden hose.  We give up because there is no hydrant to quickly squelch the fire, only growing flames as we look at failure after failure refusing to see that maybe our conventional understanding of how to reach our goals may be completely wrong.  Maybe what we need is the little guy with the broom.  Someone who can contain our self doubt before it spreads to full on failure.  Another guy with a broom who will not let one bad day ignite a path for a bad month, or even a guy with a huge unconventional combine to place limits on our fears and let them burn out all on their own.

What I would come to learn from said combine guy later, was that the fire burning up the dried out corn stalks was very good for the soil and was going to lead to a much better harvest the following year.  So, just maybe the goal should be to embrace the fire known as the journey, let others help you in new ways and realize if you try to do it on your own using the same old methods you will end up with the same fate as the garden hose, melted and charred and completely non functional. This same farmer would teach me something else about rural living, that is when the cows are chasing, all you have to do is stop.  Stop an face them and they stop too.  So on those days when it feels like we are being stampeded by fear and past failures, our job should really be to just stop, turn around and pause before we go running off again. 

I have since made the move back to suburban upstate New York, only now wiser. I take my rural lessons right along with me.  

Learning to Embrace Dopey

I can remember as a young kid watching "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".  My brothers and I would argue over who got to be which dwarf.  I distinctly remember one brother insisting on being Doc.  The logical problem solver.  To be fair, it is who he is today, even as an adult.  For me, I guess you could say I always identified with Happy.  Smiling and active.  Yes, that's who I wanted to be.  Somehow, being this character allowed me to step out of the bullying world of childhood obesity and just smile.  Nonetheless, one thing was for sure.  None of us were Dopey.  Nobody wanted to be Dopey.

 

The irony of that would come to me in a conversation I had yesterday.  A friend has challenged me to The Dopey Classic in January of 2019.  Four days of racing through Disney.  A 5k, a 10k, a half marathon and a full marathon.  We talked through the fund raising opportunity it gave us at Team 1DOS for the American Heart Association.  It was an appealing business opportunity and a good personal one, as someone close to me had open heart surgery two weeks ago.  I considered the other positives of the event, like warm weather in January, running with friends, running through the backdrop of Disney......perhaps I was awestruck by the possibilities in that moment, but I jumped at it as I often do when challenges arise these days....let us not forget the two glass of wine infused banter on New Years Eve last year that led to me finding myself 20 miles deep, on the side of a mountain, in West Virginia this August, conquering the Beast.

Later, the excitement of the moment would wear off.  I would be driving and suddenly the math would kick in.  That was about 49 miles of running in four days, the last day being a distance I have never done, let alone on a fourth consecutive day of running.  Dopey.  Dopey as in dumb, was suddenly my thought.  No wonder they named it this. I must have lost my mind.

As I tried to make sense of what I just committed to, I spent a moment really thinking about Dopey.  Who was this guy anyway?  A guy who would have the mother load of races named after him, despite the connotation of his character.  As it turns out, he was the youngest of the seven.  He was often spoken for, or ordered around. It was said that he actually did not speak simply because he did not know he could.  With all of this he was essentially the dwarf that was really counted out in most things as he was perceived as having little to offer.  So, he simply followed along with the others marching to their steps instead of his own.

This made me think about how many times we shy away from things that seem simply impossible because we have allowed other influences to convince ourselves we can't. We walk the same mundane steps behind everyone else not knowing that we really don't have to. We take what others have to say at face value, albeit destructive to our own growth, because we simply do not realize we have our own voice. 

As I consider all of this, I suddenly realize that I really don't identify with Happy.  Not by a long shot.  It is probably safe to say I never truly have.  I really am way more like Dopey, learning to find my own voice and see what is truly possible when I choose to believe I might be capable of more.  So, maybe the good people of Disney did not name this the Dopey Challenge due to the crazy nature of the run, but more as an opportunity for us to learn how to find our own voices and see what is truly possible when we step out of the mundane heigh ho march of life behind everyone else. 

Although the notion of 49 miles in four days still gives me palpitations 24 hours later, I truly believe this Dopey will find a whole new voice right there in the Magic Kingdom.  I will likely have my own march that will be far less glamorous than the march of the dwarfs and more the walk of someone who just covered 49 miles in four days.  I would suspect it will look more like a baby giraffe trying to stand for the first time, but nonetheless it will be mine and only mine. As I stare down the twelve months of training and fund raising that now is laid out in front of me, I can once again see, the best is yet to come.