Revision.

Although I'm considering this a training-focused blog for the most part, I'm going to get all personal up in here for a minute or two with some personal skeletons.  Or elephants.  Or whatever you want to call them.

Tomorrow I head home from a business trip to San Diego.  For some reason, this particular trip was an eye-opening experience because I actually had quite a bit of downtime.  Did I spend any of this downtime running?  Of course not.  While I'm angry at myself for this, I also am recognizing this as a tell-tale sign that I'm being too hard on myself and am fighting burnout.  I know from past experience that whenever I start getting gestapo-like with my training, I fight it subconsciously by boycotting training, becoming tired, tired, tired, and eating like I'm about to enter months of hibernation.  This of course, turns into a negative spiral of junk food-eating, non-working out, and feeling generally disgusting and disgusted while I reach for my fat pants off of my top closet shelf.  I've never dealt well with restriction - from myself or from others.

Right now, I'm catching myself doing exactly this.  I am totally burned out, not physically, but emotionally and more importantly, mentally.  In considering my goals for the year, my six marathons and one half ironman, I CANNOT afford to get burned out right now.  So, I'm going to revise my race schedule to still aim for and achieve this goal, but to take the pressure off by taking a mental breather right now which seems like a valiant compromise.  Either that, or end up dead somewhere, but who's keeping score anymore? 

My next marathon is on May 1st and it's going to be ridiculous.  After returning from vacation and having a relationship for which I cared rather deeply come crashing down, the devastation that has been the past three weeks has not been conducive to any long run longer than 12 miles.  I am in need of a heart transplant right now, and rather than letting myself continue to bleed out on the table, I'm shipping myself off to the ICU.  I'm going to run the Providence Marathon and try my best, and if this is simply finishing then that's my best.  Alternatively, I could always blow off Providence and do Vermont City later in May, which would give me a little more time for scraping together some long runs; I need to think about this.  Regardless, the original plan was to do my first ultramarathon just six days after Providence and my third 2011 marathon in July.  However, I think it might be in my best interest to not do either of these, and just add another fall/winter marathon instead to reach my total of six for 2011.  This will free up my summer, let myself  mentally breathe for the remainder of spring, and let me revise myself, my thinking, my life, because right now with everything that's been hurled my way including working 90-hour work weeks for the past month, it's simply too much.  It pains me to admit this publicly, but I also need to make friends with pain; if admitting that I'm human and I'm mentally exhausted and emotionally amputated is painful and out in the open and helps the healing along some, then here I am.  I think the only reason why I'm so hyper-focused on running is that if I get distracted from it, my thoughts will turn to darker alternatives.  Things are really not well.  At all.

Of course there's a catch in all of this.  There's no way I'd let myself off *that* easily.  The catch is that I can postpone all of this spring madness as long as I start trying to accept myself instead of looking in the mirror with disgust and just seeing nothing but major room for improvement.  I'm so devastated over this recent loss that I'm blaming myself for everything and it's making my world dark and scary and filled with self-hatred about every minute detail possible.  Overcoming this will be harder than any of my races.  All of my friends tell me that I'm supposedly a catch, but the stark reality of the situation is that I'm easily overlooked by the opposite sex because physically I'm big bird in the midst of a flock of  doves.  I could be the heiress to a country and Nobel Prize winner and still be solo, because as much as we hate to admit it, appearances do matter.  I know I really can't do anything about that other than stand to lose some weight (emotionally and physically), and the only way I can do that right now in my mind is remove the training pressure.  But you know what?  I'm not even going to stop there.  I'm removing the dating pressure too.  Hell, I'm going to remove all pressure-expectations for that matter.  I'm exhausted and frankly, I would rather just try to work through this emotional swamp and then resign to the fact that I could quite possibly, be single and continue to fall short of my own expectations for the rest of my life.  None of it matters anyway, because we all end up as corpses eventually.  I'm sure this sounds dramatic, but I'd rather just admit the reality of the situation rather than try to paint some unicorn-and-roses-fantasy that is simply growing more and more grim by the day.  I love my friends and I love my family, and while they can fill the lonely void, reality and past experience has shown me that when people make their series of life-turns, they also tend to turn away from their single friends and towards their own lives.  Perhaps embracing this possibly-permanent single status now will help me to accept this possibly-permanent alone status later. 

So, because I'm a planner by nature and work best with some structure, my plan is to scrape together what emotional dignity I have left, try to work through it and then saddle back up with hefty training again to do my fall marathons and possibly an early winter marathon.  Then there's the New Year, then next winter and ski racing season and then look - this time of year is back again!  (Ugh!) 

...

Last week, a very loved, but very crazy person in my life got married to someone whom she had never met in person until...last week.  But you know what?  Going viral seemed to work for her.  Maybe the viral approach is what I should try next as my last resort?  Clearly what I've been doing has not really been working. 

My open threat to myself right now is that if I'm in these same shoes next year in April - single, feeling horrible, feeling tired and overworked and under appreciated and just generally taken advantage of, then maybe I'm on to something here; maybe all of this trying and all of these efforts really *aren't* working.  If this is the case at this time next year, then I'm going to leave for a change of scenery.  I love Boston, but if in a year these same shoes with the holes are still on my feet, I'm going to shed them and move on because at that point, I think it could be the environment to blame.  I have a year to decide where I'm going to flock, a year to do research and thinking and planning.  I dearly love Boston, but I'm afraid that again, it's yet another one of those situations of loving but not being loved in return.  I cannot keep living like this.  I'm willing to give Boston one year to convince me that staying in Boston is in fact, worth it, because right now my life just feels filled with grey, cloudy destruction and sadness and demise - I have nothing except for my house that is holding me back from leaving and finding sunny happiness elsewhere.  I'm so depressed with it all that it physically hurts.  Right now the cons are stomping all over the very, very small number of pros, and if you were to ask me right now what I'd do, I would leave.  Perhaps this is my own version of going viral, with a planning twist of course.  Or maybe it's just a big breather, or maybe it's all some insane vision while in my own emotional ICU, fighting to live still for whatever unknown reason.  It is something to focus on though, other than the sharp edges that shouldn't be that way. 

I feel like I just bled all over you.