I don’t want to kill the endorphins you are reaping from running and a healthy lifestyle, but I need to take a pause from enveloping everything in positivity and reveal this weakness that has plagued me all week: Doubt.
If you’re having a good day and achieving such by avoiding negativity, skip this entry as I, like David Bowie did when wrote the music to the Hours... album, try to force my mind past this paralyzing noun of uncertainty and reach a platform of acceptance (like Bowie did in Heathen album).
I’ve been weighing myself every two weeks since I signed up for the marathon—not to indulge in the game of seeing how low that number can go, but to show myself:
1. How these lifestyle adjustments have affected me physically.
2. That in the scope of how good I feel and how much better my clothes are fitting, those numbers are rubbish.
However, that didn’t stop me from becoming devastated when I saw that I accrued 2 lbs since the previous weigh-in, despite the added miles and quinoa. Trust me, I know how lame this reads and it may very well belong in a Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul book. If this is the level of devastation I reach this week, then the week must be going pretty damn good as a whole. But all I was picturing was me now running with a 2 lb weight that would inevitably slow me down when I reached mile 5. (Mile 7 is where I normally start teetering out, but with the added weight of a guinea pig, I’ve let Doubt tell me it’s now mile 5.)
It also told me I didn’t do a good job in last Sunday’s “Da Plan” jog, and that my hair looks odd.
Maybe this is the part where I need to tell Doubt to “F*** off.”
This could very much be part of the training. In the way we work on adapting to heat, mountains, desert, and the lack of water sources at a beer festival, it’s probably just as important to work on how to deal with Doubt; whether you let it keep you down or you get back up to kick it in the face (after all, that’s what Rocky Balboa beautifully illustrated during that goose-bump inducing speech he gives to his son in Rocky Balboa).
Rather than try to deny and sweep this Doubt of not being able to run far enough or not harmonizing with scale numbers my unhealthy mind sees fit, I’m going to say, “Okay. There’s that. Let’s see what this negative emotion can do for me.” Then I’ll outrun it.
Who knew (besides everyone who has done it) how much of a mental sea voyage the act of training for a marathon could be? By October, I hope to be so familiar with Doubt and Discomfort that I don’t even stop to say “What the hell?” when it appears at mile 7, 10, 14-18, 22-24, and 25.
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