CTRL-ALT-DEL

Sometimes in life, you need to reboot; much like this crappy laptop I'm using. Recently, I realized that I desperately needed to reboot my life, in a major way. Unfortunately, I realized it the hard way. In the middle of a race for which I had been training for eight long months, I had a major emotional breakdown. Mental health/mental illness is nothing to laugh at, there isn't a damn thing about it that's funny. I didn't ask for either of these issues. I would give anything so I didn't have to deal with this shit on a daily basis. But, I'm not that lucky. It's part of who I am. Anyway, as part of my training, I started keeping a Mason jar of rocks. On each of those rocks was written the distance of my long training runs. I was halfway to filling my second jar when I realized I had stopped keeping track. There was a significant change in my training. And I increased my training runs, doing them much more often. I wasn't enjoying it as much as I had when I first started. This probably should have been my first sign.

The beauty, silence, and solitude of the trails stopped making me happy. I stopped feeling the sense of inner peace that I had developed. I was losing what I had begun to love so much. I was losing myself, and who I had worked so hard to become.

The weeks before the race were spent crying. My husband didn't know what to do with me, and I had nowhere else to turn. I trained for a 100k, I was doing a 100k. My body was ready. I was hell-bent on doing it.  What I hadn't realized was how my body was going to let me down during the race. At one point, I turned off my GPS watch. I didn't care how far I had gone, and I didn't care how much further I had to go. All I knew was I didn't want to be there. My heart and my brain deserted me that day. I was so mad at myself, all I could do was sob. I couldn't even speak when one of the volunteers asked me if I was OK, if I needed to see a medic. I could hardly breathe. Turns out, I didn't go crazy that day.

I was burned out, both mentally and emotionally. But being in such a fragile state, I hadn't even realized it was happening. I discovered a lot about life while I was recuperating. No, not physically. Mentally. Emotionally. It was my brain that couldn't understand what happened. It was my heart that had been shattered. I spent the following three weeks in tears. I was grieving. I felt like I had suffered a major loss in my life. My husband frantically texted my friend, because he wasn't sure I was going to get through this; and to be honest, I wasn't either. My heart was broken and my thoughts were dark.



 

I've meet many monsters throughout my life. But I'll take a broken and scarred person with a genuine heart any day. And after a while, I realized that they were there all along. The handful of people who stayed with me when it was dark.





 

They waited for me to heal, checked on my during the process (which has been long, and still isn't completely over), let me get through things in the ways I needed, and welcomed me back with open arms and hearts. And I love them. I loved them before, but I love them even more now. So, thank you. You might not have realized you were doing anything different, but be sure that I noticed. Today, I took that half full Mason jar outside after my run and I dumped it in my driveway.

 

 

I'm ready. I'm ready to start over, and remember why I fell in love with running in the first place. It wasn't about people. It was about me. For the first time in what seems like forever, I was making time for myself. I put that first rock in my jar today, and smiled. Physically, it feels like I'm starting over, but that's alright. I'm not competing with anyone. I'm trying to enjoy myself. I'm trying to find myself again. And I'll be doing it in my own way, at my own pace, on my own time.

 

 

 

I might not be there yet, but every day I can feel myself getting closer.