These last couple of weeks I have been following some friends who have been doing some pretty incredible things.  One running friend has always inspired me by the number of marathons he does in a short period of time.  A couple years back he ran fifty-two full marathons in one year and even added a few half marathons and shorter races for good measure.  As if that wasn't crazy enough, he has been training to take his running to the next level--a couple weeks back he ran a 100-mile race and shaved 3 hours and 47 minutes off his last attempt.
          I have another friend who I would classify as obsessed these days.  She started out as a pretty typical exerciser doing a few miles of running at a time just a year ago. Lately she has been running close to forty miles a week in addition to all the other workouts she does throughout the week.
          As I was thinking about these two people and many of my other running friends' craziness when it comes to our exercise routines, it occurred to me that when I think of their practice as crazy, there may be people who think the same thing about me.  Yesterday I got the funniest Facebook post from one of my high school buddies in response to the fact that by 7:30am I had already completed running a little over 10 miles..."Hey...I just woke up! Michelle - you both inspire and make me feel totally lame at the same time!!!" I am always happy to inspire, but never want to discourage, so let me explain my crazy.
          First, when it comes to the early times I choose to do my workouts, this is not actually a choice.  To justify time spent away from my children I try to be home before they wake up.  So when I start my training before the sun rises, it is not because I want to but more because I need to.  Working out is not a choice, so I have to do early.
          I admit, in the beginning my running workouts had only one purpose...allowing me to finally lose those pounds that had been weighing me down for years.  As I became a stronger runner, and as I moved into a more reasonable weight range, I needed to increase my workouts to challenge myself.  A two mile run no longer gave me the same good feeling that it had in the beginning.  Not to mention that a two mile run was taking me less than twenty minutes to complete, which was not long enough for me.
          That is why I decided to take on the 13.1 mile length of craziness.  For a person that honestly thought that a 5K was as long as I would ever be able to accomplish, a half marathon was a stretch.  And then after I had accomplished not only the one half-marathon at Disney but an average of about one similar length race a month, that too became less of a challenge than I wanted.  This is when I let Karrie talk me into the ultimate crazy--completing Ironman!
          Now I realize that the kind of exercise I did during my Vineman training was crazy at its craziest, but you have to know that it would have been even crazier not to train for it.  Once I committed to doing the full Ironman race, I had to also commit to running, biking, and swimming ridiculous amounts in order to be prepared for race day.  There was no way I was going into that day without knowing that I had done everything I could to make sure I crossed that finish line.
          With that Ironman level of training in mind, what I do now seems more reasonable:

• Tuesdays and Thursdays I do 5 mile runs
  

• Wednesdays and Fridays I swim or do a spin class
• Saturdays are long runs of about 8-10 miles
• Sundays we usually bike at least 30 miles
• Mondays I rest--and I take my off days seriously

As I look at my weekly workouts I see balance, but I am not crazy enough to think that others feel the same way.  That is why I have come to the conclusion that crazy is relative.  When someone who doesn't exercise sees what I do, they might think that I am off my rocker, but for those like my friends that I shared about at the start of this blog, they may see piece of cake workouts.  I think it all depends on where we are on our workout journey.
          And do you want to know what I feel is absolutely the craziest part of my workouts?  It is not the number of workouts I do each week.  It is not the number of miles or time I spend working out.  What is truly crazy to me is that I love every second I spend running, biking, and swimming, and that kind of crazy is something I am perfectly happy with.  I am a crazy runner, biker, and swimmer, and I am proud of it!

          It was one of those long difficult weeks.  We all have them, but we don't all use food to make ourselves feel better.  Pair that with a spotty workout week due to a massive migraine and no one to watch Eoin so I could continue my workout routine (Sean and Siobhan are in Montana visiting her likely college choice), and it was a recipe for a disaster that I occasionally create in my mind.  What I mean is that I tend to make things bigger than they really are, and I tend to be very hard on myself.  Yesterday, for the first time in years, I looked in the mirror and I saw a distorted image of myself--I saw fat and bulges that weren't there, and it shook me up a bit.  Thankfully, when I woke up this morning my image of myself was back to normal, but it made me so frustrated that I can be so unkind to myself sometimes.  So to put myself back on track, I am choosing to be more positive...
          On this day after Valentine's Day, I am reflecting on just how lucky I am.  While I continue to nitpick my flaws big and small on a daily basis, I have managed to choose a mate that loves me flaws and all.  Even at my heaviest, even when I spent my life covering up my bulges and hiding from every photo opportunity, my husband Sean continued to love me despite what I thought of myself.  And while he is loving the new me, he loved me and thought I was beautiful even when I carried more than 230 pounds on my body.
          So why is it that many of us find it difficult to love ourselves?  In my case, I have never really felt comfortable in my own skin.  If I am truly honest, I don't even like spending time alone with myself and I never have. This was actually something that I had to add as part of my Ironman training.  Because I love to train with my friends, I actually had to plan sessions where I ran, swam and biked by myself to simulate the time I would spend by myself on the Ironman course.  What I found through this process was that being alone was not scary--no one was staring at me and wondering why I was alone.  I actually found that having this alone time was healthy and productive.  I could think over issues that were troubling me, plan some of my work training sessions, and I even wrote some blogs in my head on these solo training sessions. 
          In my research for this blog I came across an interesting resource with ten easy suggestions for being kind to yourself--I will summarize it a bit and put on my own spin as well: 10 Really Easy Ways You Can Love Yourself More Today! by Gala Darling

1. As I shared above, the first thing the author suggests is to spend some time alone getting comfortable with yourself.  If I can do it, anyone can!
   
2. Give yourself a compliment.  We are taught to be humble, but sometimes we just need to cheer ourselves on. Today I reminded myself how brave I can be by always setting higher goals for myself physically. I am choosing to focus on what I am doing well until I can get my eating back under control.
   
3. The author suggests reading poetry, but I just suggest finding time to read or do what makes you happy.  I don't often make time to read even though it is one of my favorite pastimes.  You are important enough to cut out a little quality time to do things you love!  Today I put on my favorite tunes and danced around the bathroom--music also makes me happy!
   
4. It is more important to be beautiful on the inside than on the outside.  I have spent so much of my life focused on my physical appearance, that I rarely stopped to think that while I do want to be a healthy weight, my friends and family love me no matter what because I am a good person.  I am not making excuses, and I know I need to gain some control, but I need to put this issue in perspective.
   
5. Her suggestion to write a love letter to ourselves on the mirror is not one I have tried, but I do have love and support messages from my kids proudly displayed where I can read them each morning.  These messages remind me that I am strong and keep me moving forward on difficult days.
6. Surrounding yourself with positive images and people is an excellent way to be loving to yourself.  I know that when I am surrounded by negative situations and people I feel drained.  I make it a point to try to walk away from this negativity because it can also be contagious.
7. I could not agree more with the author's suggestion to take the time to get out and move your body.  I know that I always feel better after a run, bike, or swim.  It can be hard to fit in workouts with our busy schedules, but what better way to show yourself love than to make YOU a priority.
8. I interpret her eighth suggestion to mean that we should feel comfortable being ourselves.  I am a little strange and I can be a bit neurotic, but I think my family and friends love and appreciate me just the way I am.  Never feel like you need to change to meet someone else's expectations--we should have left that all behind when we graduated from high school, right? Never be afraid to be you!
9. Her suggestion to go to bed early and get more rest is a great one, but it is one that I am still working on. Attempting to balance my family's needs (dinner, homework and reading), a heavy load at work, and my precious workout sessions can leave me less rested than I would like. Not to mention that even when I make a good effort, sometimes things are out of my control.  Last night Siobhan's cat decided to spend the whole night purring, kneading, and sleeping on my head, which did not leave me feeling rested today despite my going to bed early.
10. And I completely agree with Gala's final suggestion that it is important to give back to others.  This is part of the reason I take time each week to write my blog.  It keeps me accountable, and I hope that it resonates with my readers and makes them realize they are not alone. 
    

We all have good and bad days, but it is important that we never stop loving ourselves, no matter how flawed me might sometimes feel.  I am a work in progress...

Beauty is when you can appreciate yourself. When you love yourself, that's when you're most beautiful.
                                Zoe Kravitz

          In our society there are certain things that are taboo...things that make people uncomfortable if they are brought up in polite conversation.  Topics like sex and sexuality, death and suicide, politics or religion with people who hold an opposing view, nudity, bodily fluids and body parts, are all topics that society tells us are not appropriate to bring up when talking to other human beings.  And because of these unwritten social niceties, and the fact that there are subjects that you do not even share with your best of friends, I spent years feeling like a freak, like I was the only one who suffered from this issue.  Ten years ago two of my friends gave me a gift they probably did not even know they were gifting me, and so today I would like to return the favor.
          I must be up front and warn you that this blog might make you feel a little uncomfortable.  It might make you look at me in a different way.  And because of this I would like to allow you to log off now and choose to not know this deep, dark secret about me...
          For those of you that are still with me, I will now return to sharing about the gift I was given by my friends.  Before Eoin was born, Sean and I were avid tennis players.  It was the first thing Sean and I did together to get ourselves back in shape.  To improve our tennis skills, we would often take private lessons with small groups of our tennis friends.  At one of these private lessons, my two friends were going for a ball and ended up running right into each other and bouncing into the fence.  The two of them began to laugh hysterically holding their stomachs and rolling on the ground.  They were laughing so hard that they could hardly speak, but I did hear one of them squeak out, "Oh my God...I am going to pee my pants."  And then the other one added in, "As if all that jumping and bouncing around didn't already make it hard enough to keep it all in."  I paused in shock.  These girls were ten years younger than me, and here they were freely blurting out what I had been hiding for years--when I cough, when I sneeze, when I laugh, I have difficulty not letting the "tears" run down my legs.  In fact, one time I was presenting in front of an entire group of teachers, male and female, and they made me laugh so hard that I had to sneak home at lunch to put on a new outfit.

          Even now it is hard to use the words and admit that I suffer from a mild case of incontinence.  There it is, officially out in the open. It happens to many of us that have children.  I just think that we are so bound by what we can and cannot share, that many of you may be in the same boat as me and I would never know it.
          And the ironic thing is that while we are not supposed to talk about it, the medical profession seems to be unaware of this social taboo.  Once I finally decided to seek medical advice I not only had to share my difficulty with my primary doctor, but before I could even see the urologist, they made me go to a class with a bunch of strangers while we all sat around uncomfortably listening to our options. And did I mention that I was one of two people under sixty in that room?  And as if that wasn't humiliating enough, they assigned me to the best looking doctor in the entire hospital.  I could hardly look at him as I was answering his probing medical questions, but once I got over the embarrassment, this doctor actually helped me.
          Besides wanting to make this subject less taboo, the other reason I felt compelled to share this week is that I have a friend, who used to be a runner, act surprised to learn that I could still run with this condition.  She had given up running due to the problem. The truth is, that when I first started running, before I went to the doctor, it was a little uncomfortable, but I worked around it.  I hydrated the night before races, but I was always careful the morning of races to not drink too much.  I hit the porta-potties several times before the race gun went off, and, just in case none of that worked, I would wear a pad. 
          I know--TMI!  But I am hoping this may help other readers realize that they do not have to give up exercising just because they suffer from this condition or other ailments.  I am hoping that just one person can see that while I suffer from mild incontinence, I still exercise 5-6 days a week, I still run half marathons on a consistent basis, and I still finished a full Ironman length race without being affected at all by this problem. Sometimes you just need to find solutions, but giving up should never be your first option!

Below find my favorite Monty Python video--again, sometimes it just helps to laugh!

          When I shared what I was capable of, some of you doubted me. I told you what I could do, and you thought it was all in my mind.  Even after I pushed through Ironman despite the odds against me, some readers thought I was exaggerating my skill level. You would think by now when I say I can do something and that it is something I am skillful at, that few would doubt my sincerity.  And yet, I am forced to say those totally annoying words, "I told you so!"
          So what is it that I have proven myself more than capable of achieving?  Weight gain.  Since completing the longest race of my career and being in the best shape of my life, my clothes are fitting tighter and I have gained back more than ten of the pounds that I worked so hard to take off. And this is despite never working out less than five days a week. I have shared that I love food...all food, and this is making it very difficult to stay on the straight and narrow. I have not been logging my food consistently, and while I have stayed away from Cinnamon Toast Crunch, chocolate, my major trigger, has been factoring significantly in my backslide.
          So today as I was getting ready to go running, I saw Eoin's motivational poster reminding me that I have lightning and fight power within me.  However, I began to wonder if one of my greatest faults is in giving too much influence to my weight gaining power.  Maybe if I believed as much in my skill to keep my weight off as in my skill to put it back on, just maybe I could keep it all off for once.
          Now I am not going to beat myself up, because I have been getting out there and moving my body on a very consistent basis.  I even ran this morning despite the fact that no one could get up and do an early morning workout with me, and you all know how I hate to run solo.  I just need to find a way to get out of this eating crappy food rut.  I need to regroup, and take the time to really plan what my next healthy eating steps will be.  Once I have figured it all out, I will share my thoughts with you and hopefully I can begin to move myself back on the road to the more flabulous me.