Wherein I Pay Money to Torture Myself

Many people start a fitness program as a personal resolution. I was blackmailed. During my sophomore year of high school my older sister (and ride home from school) decided to join the Cross Country team and begged me to do it with her. She said she wanted company but I think she just wanted to make sure she wasn’t the slowest one on the team. I flat-out refused but only held strong for a few weeks, at which point I decided that running had to be better than taking the bus home. I was wrong.

It was miserable those first few weeks. Our coach would give us a route and then set up water stations at a few points in the middle, but my sister and I were always so slow that he’d moved to the next station before we got there. It ended up being just me and her running on our own, struggling to make it during the route around town and then pushing it when we got close to school so the boys’ soccer team would see us at our fastest. Then we’d hop in her Pontiac Sunbird and curse running the whole ride home. If we weren’t so competitive with each other I think we both would’ve quit.

Last week I signed up for my first marathon. It’s been a goal of mine ever since I finished that first Cross Country season and realized what my body could do with regular training. I know the next four months will be a lot of hard work, and I’m nervous about overstressing a body that has been so good to me through so many different exercises (yoga! spinning! half marathons! TRX!) over the past 15 years. But beneath the unavoidable trepidations, I’m mostly just excited to pursue this lifelong goal and see once again how far my body can take me. And I’m thrilled to have my awesome husband and great friend Lisa joining me for the ride. xo

A goal, accomplished.

I finished the coursework for my MBA program last night, and this morning I woke up to a world bright with the hope of new possibilities and the joy of fulfilled goals. I’ve run cross country and conquered half marathons but even that type of training can’t compare to the three and a half years of constant concentration and sheer will that led to me today. I’ve never fought so hard to accomplish anything, and no achievement has ever felt quite like this.

It makes me emotional to think about it, in a sort of melodramatic, introspective way that often takes me over at times like this. It makes me wonder what my teenage self would think about my 27-year-old life. I’m sure she would be wholly unimpressed by the largely conventional life I’m living now—husband, home in the suburbs, 9-5 job. I always dreamed I’d be living in a big city and doing something very creative. But I think, at its heart, that what I’ve always hoped most for myself is to find a way to carve out a little piece of the earth and claim it as my own, giving it life through friends and family and light through creativity and passion. I hoped I’d figure out what I wanted, and then pursue it without abandon. I hoped I’d have a love I’d walk to the ends of the earth for. My life is not remarkable, but I have achieved all of these things, and so I have bounties beyond my imagination. My cup runneth over. (I told you I was feeling dramatic!)

It’s strange how the achievement of one goal can make you feel like the skies have opened and your life is different. I don’t even have my diploma yet. But I feel different on the inside, lighter, stronger, more self-assured. I feel elated with accomplishment, and that feeling almost means more than the accomplishment itself.

But I still want the diploma.