These last couple of weeks, I’ve decided I want to run this year’s Pioneer Pride 5K.
This has nothing to do with art and writing, unless you count the fact that all my training time is taking away time I could use for writing and art. Which I probably do count. Because I count everything. I am a highly sophisticated squirrel with a calendar.
But anyway. I let myself go a bit at the end of last year. Not catastrophically. I didn’t become a Victorian fainting couch or anything. I just stopped running the way I used to. Then in January, I started again off and on, mostly on the treadmill, but March and April were rough months. Depression moved in, unpacked several bags, rearranged the furniture, and made running feel like one more thing I used to care about.
Then my eldest son said he had joined a running club where he lives and was training for a 5K.
And ta da! My motivation appeared.
All the time my boys were growing up, I really, really, really wanted to run with them. I had this small dream tucked away that we might jog together someday. Not competitively. Not heroically. Just one of those ordinary wonderful things where your feet are moving in the same direction and nobody has to explain much.
But they were never interested in becoming runners. Not even little jogs. My eldest wasn’t an athlete at all, and my youngest was full-time dealing with Crohn’s disease symptoms, so running wasn’t even on the menu. Eventually, I had to give up that dream.
Until May.
When my eldest told me he was learning to run, I told him how proud I was. Then I asked, as casually as a mother can ask a question while trying not to glow in the dark, whether maybe we could run together sometime.
He said sure.
So the next question was when.
I mentioned that the Pioneer Pride 5K is in August. I told him it was a tough race, but maybe he’d consider it?
He gave me a definite maybe.
Good enough.
The thing is, Pioneer Pride really is a grueling race. It’s always in mid-August, when East Tennessee has achieved its traditional summer form: hot, humid, and vaguely soup-like. I’ve even run it in a thunderstorm, don’t you know. I think I actually placed first in my age group that year too, which sounds impressive until you consider that the competition may have been sheltering sensibly under awnings.
Still. I’ll take it.
The last quarter mile of that race is a steep uphill climb. It is not subtle. It does not pretend to be your friend. It appears near the end like a villain with excellent timing.
But once you get over that hill, you go down a slight slope, then down the long slope of Main Street toward the finish line. People line up along the road and cheer you on. There’s music. There’s that strange, exhausted joy of realizing you’re actually going to finish.
And then, of course, there’s pizza.
And other snacks. Since the race raises money for the local high school cross country team, the finish line is full of teenager-favorite snack foods. Pizza. Chips. Sugary things. The sacred buffet of adolescent metabolism. There’s usually a DJ with good music too.
Yep. I love that race. It’s one of my favorites.
So this week, I started serious training outside, running hills. Dang, it’s been harder than ever.
I’ll turn sixty a week before the race, and I’m seriously feeling it now. This morning, at least, was cool, and the trail was beautiful.
The most challenging part of running for me at this point in my life is trying to keep my heart rate in a good zone. It gets high too fast when I’m running hills, especially in the heat and humidity. So when I’m not on the treadmill, I’ve been having to do run-walks.
That’s been disappointing.
My legs aren’t tired. My muscles feel strong. My body says, “Sure, why not?” But my heart says, “Excuse me, who authorized this hill?”
Part of me blames post-COVID changes and not knowing, at the time, how to retrain my neurology after being sick. Part of me knows this is also just aging. And part of me is deeply offended that I can’t just order my body to behave like it did ten or fifteen years ago. Apparently the body has opinions. Rude.
Still, I think I’m pretty lucky that I can still run at all. A lot of people my age can’t. So I’m trying to hold both truths at once: this is harder than it used to be, and I’m grateful I can do it.
Meanwhile, in the studio, I’ve been taking it easy. I signed up for Anna Mason’s nature journaling classes, and I’ve been mindlessly practicing watercolor. I don’t mean mindless in a bad way. It’s actually been nice not having to make decisions. I just follow the tutorials. Her voice is easy to listen to, and the whole thing feels low-pressure in the best possible way.
I’ve made it even easier by doing the work on 2.5 x 3.5 inch cards, so nothing takes too long to finish. Tiny art is useful that way. It doesn’t stand in the doorway wearing a velvet cape and demanding your life’s purpose. It just says, “Here. Paint this little thing.”
These are what I finished last week:
Today I decided to try a tiny graphite drawing of clouds. I think it came out pretty good, and it didn’t take more than an hour to finish it.
On the writing front, I haven’t done a thing except brainstorm ideas, which absolutely counts, except when it doesn’t.
I want to write another story, either a short story or a novella, in the LitRPG genre. After reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I can’t help wanting more of that kind of energy. Something exciting and funny and entertaining. It won’t be a story about Carl and Princess Donut, obviously, but it could still have that spirit of chaos, danger, humor, and “what fresh nonsense is this?” momentum.
That sounds fun to me. And I think fun matters.
I’ve also been migrating all my old blog posts to Realmscapes. What a chore that’s been. I never realized how much I’ve blogged. This summer, I’ll have been a blogger for ten years.
Ten years!
I couldn’t believe it myself when I started looking through all my files. Ten years of thinking out loud. Ten years of half-formed ideas, creative experiments, life changes, rambling, art, stories, essays, doubts, discoveries, and probably a large number of sentences that begin with “Anyway.”
I plan on writing a post about it. I’ll have to celebrate somehow, and I’ll have to share some thoughts about what it means to keep a blog for ten years. But that’s for next time.
For now, I’m running hills, painting tiny things, thinking about game-lit dungeons, and gathering old pieces of myself into one place.
It’s a strange summer, but a good one. I hope you’re having as much fun as I am.
