The Year Ahead

For those of you who don't know this, more than likely because I have been more focused on emotional than physical states of being in this entire blog, I am a runner.

That is to say, I am not a very fast runner, or a very talented or graceful runner, but I enjoy running fairly passionately. My week feels off if I have not run at least 20 miles. I feel sinfully guilty if I am injured or ill and have to cut back on my running. Stress is worse than usual if I can't find the time to pound out five miles a few days a week. And I have been suffering from bilateral runner's knee since August. This means that I have been running very little, though slowly and slowly more, since starting physical therapy in October. Yesterday, for the first time since August, I managed to run a whole six miles.

This may seem like a ton of running to those of you not in shape, or not as addicted to this sport as I am, but before my knees hurt so much I could barely walk I was running near 30 miles a week, and reaching about 10 miles for my distance run one day a week. 6 miles is a good mark to have reached, since it is longer than my usual runs of around 5 miles a piece, but it is still short of the 10-11 miles I had been reaching and the half-marathon that I'm training for in April. But it's a start.

Anyway, so last year I subscribed to Runner's World, and with that subscription came a free training calendar. Not extremely spiffy, but it had dates and grids and suggestions, and a place to write down and add up my daily, weekly, and monthly mileages. I did not get this calendar for free this year, so I decided, after a year of knowing what I wrote down and what I didn't, that I would create my own calendar on the computer, with my weeks starting on Monday as I usually put them in my running. I have 2 weeks on each page, and spots for weekly running goals (for stuff like distance and speed- useful since I am still builing up my mileage and am governed by the ten percent rule- one should not add more than 10 percent to one's mileage in a week or one will likely get injured).

What really affected me was typing in the dates. I have goals for the first third of the year, which is probably good enough, because I may hurt myself or get sick during that time, and then have to rework my goals for the rest of the year if I tried to make goals through December. But when I started typing in dates I was thinking- How will my student teaching be going by this point in March? Will I still be living in my house at this date in May or with my parents? Will I be running on my treadmill in their basement instead of my spare room? Will I still be married when I reach our fifth wedding anniversary? Will he have come back to me by this holiday? Where will my new teaching job be? Will I be starting it at this date late in August? Will I be thinking about how he will have been gone an entire year on Nov. 1, 2006, or will I be thinking about how far we've come since then? Will I have a new condo? Will we have a new condo?

No matter the answers to all of these questions, it should be a momentous year.