Lately I've had a lot of people telling me that, essentially, I'm amazing. Losing 26kg doesn't go unnoticed, or, if it does, you've seriously got to question who the people in your life are. And it's really nice to hear! I've spent a lot of time in my life being told I'm not good enough, so to have people tell me I'm inspiring, it feels pretty freggin' good. Yesterday I was at the gym and my personal trainer came up to me and told me that I'm doing amazing, and that even the other members were commenting on how well I'm doing. I mean, that's pretty awesome!
The only down side to this new found attention and admiration is that sometimes people just don't get it. These are the people who ask me how I've manged to lose so much weight and when I say, "I work really hard, every day" they just look at me blankly. Then they usually say how they wish they could lose weight too and start listing off a bunch of excuses for why they can't. I've never had a lot of patience for people's excuses. I was once at a craft store looking to buy a photo album for my pictures of my trip to Peru, and the sales associate said to me that she wished she could travel but she's got family, you know how it is. To which I dead pan replied: "Well, we've all got priorities." She didn't take that comment too kindly, which really is the stupidest thing of all because it's absolutely the truth: we've all got priorities. And for her, whatever "I've got family, you know how it is" means is more of a priority than travelling.
It's the same with weight loss and fitness. If you want to do it, you've got to make it a priority in your life. It doesn't necessarily have to be your #1 priority, but I reckon that if you're serious about it, it needs to be one of your top 5 priorities. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. You don't go to sleep every night wishing you could be something other than what you are, only to wake up one morning and find yourself magically transformed. Changing yourself takes hard work! The kind of hard work that I've seen hard working, motivated and determined people shy away from.
But here's the thing: yeah, it's really hard to transform yourself in some way. It doesn't stay hard though. It's not always a grueling process, and you don't always question why the hell you're putting yourself through the process. That's just how it starts. If you keep going with it, it really does get easier. And yes, that generally means it's time to challenge yourself harder, but you know what? Those challenges get easier to take on too.
A year ago if you had told me I had 3 weeks to train myself to run 5km, I would have probably spurted a fair number of obscenities at you. But today, I'm a week away from the race and in this morning's training session I ran 4 of my 5km, and then went to yoga, and have felt strong and energetic all day. It is a challenge to run 5km, but it's no longer a big one.
After I complete Run Melbourne, I am going to continue running. I'm not very fast, and I'd like to get fast. But for now I'm working on building up my strength so that I can run without injuring myself (the new shoes are making a world of difference on that front). I guess that's the thing that some people don't really understand: you can't just roll out of bed one morning and be able to do something you've never done before. You've got to work towards it. And that generally means taking the larger goal and breaking it down into smaller goals. Eventually, I'll be able to run fast because that is something that I want to accomplish and I am actively working towards it. In the meantime, I'm pretty damn stoked at myself for completing today's 5km run in 0:38:15. Since I'm no longer completely ceasing up and in pain after running, I'll be doing a lot of running this week to prepare myself for next Sunday's race.
There is something else frustrating about self transformation that I am probably more sympathetic about: it takes a lot of time. I'm not exactly known to be a patient person, so I definitely get the frustration at the fact that you can't just decide to work at something and accomplish it straight away. I certainly have learned to be a helluva lot more patient through my fitness journey - or at least to be patient with myself. I've stuck with it long enough to know that I will get the results I want if I keep at it, and that helps a lot. Because there are absolutely times where I just want to go full tilt into something, but I can't. Like with swimming. One spectacular day I beat my best time by 2 minutes. It was amazing! That was a month ago and all I've managed to do since is match my second best time, and that was with a great deal of effort.
Changing yourself involves taking a lot of baby steps, or at least it does if you want it to be lasting change. Which is what I have to remind myself of on a pretty regular basis, because I've secretly wanted to be this hard core athletic person for most of my life. And now that I'm closer than I've ever been to obtaining it, it can be really frustrating to think how much further I still have to go. But I'll get there, and I know that. I've worked way too hard and come way too close to accomplishing my goal to stop now!!
This might be a weird tangent to go on, but in my head the link makes sense. I was talking to one of my dearest and oldest friends this weekend about the trials and tribulations of life. Though me and her have different belief systems, we both think about our lives as constituting a narrative: we are the heroines of stories that someone else is writing. Maybe because we are both writers ourselves, we both struggle with the fact that we're not in on the plot line. It's like Stranger Than Fiction: we know that we are in a story, we know that someone else is telling the story, and we're not too happy about not having control over the outcome of the story.
I've been thinking about this a lot since our conversation, though I've thought about it a lot before then too. I absolutely believe that there is some greater force beyond myself that is, to some extent, directing my life. I'm just very reluctant to put a name to what that force may be and very hostile to the idea that somehow this force could be summed up through any one particular belief system (hence why the thought of being part of a religion makes me hiss and spit, and also why I find atheism incredibly reductionist). That being said, it's not like this force has complete control over what we do and that everything in our lives are predetermined. That's just ridiculous! Why would whatever force of the universe there may or may not be bother with having sentient life if only to predetermine every move they make? (Unless, of course, we aren't really sentient...)
I like to think about my life narrative as being of the choose-your-own-adventure variety. Of course, instead of having two choices to pick between to move the story forward, we sometimes can have infinite choices. I think about the mysterious workings of fate like a choose-your-own-adventure book because in those books, invariably there are certain events that you will end up at regardless of what path you take. That doesn't make the journey to those events pointless; quite the opposite! The journey we take to that destination will affect the decisions we make and the next path we take. The journey is, in fact, much more important than the destination.
The two of us are both dealing with one story line ending and the frustration of not knowing where the story is going to go from there. What I have learnt on my various journeys is that life will continue going on, no matter what, and that in time, a new plot line will reveal itself. So, as we both wait for that storyline where we get to enact our own version of Bridesmaids (great movie btw) we've got other story lines in our lives to develop. And who knows where the journey those take us on will lead?
Since my life story can essentially be told through Kanye West songs (seriously), I'll let Mr. West take us out again!
I don't ever wanna go back there so imma be taking no days off until my spaceship takes off.
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