sick.

I woke up Thursday with a sore throat that slowly but surely progressed into full-on sickness, bad enough that I texted my father this morning to ask if he thought I should go to the doctor. My dad works in healthcare but is in no way a medical professional so I'm not sure why I insist on plaguing him with my questions, particularly when his advice is always, "It's probably a virus." (Except for the one time about five years ago when it was strep and his response was, "You are 26, who gets strep when they're 26?!") I didn't have a fever and then I found DayQuil under my bathroom sink which pleased me to no end because it's basically like crack. Anyway the sickness sort of made me happy in a strange way because it's textbook for me. Every time I start running again, for real, when I am excited about it and have a training plan, I come down with an annoying and drawn-out sickness. I like to think it is my body's way of accepting the fact that it won't have a chance to be idle for awhile and thus getting all illness out of the way early on. In an odd way it's like the final seal of approval on what I've been feeling lately, which is just that I want to be out there running.

But instead I spent my days off coughing, napping, sneezing, popping gel tabs and making simultaneously good and bad decisions. And watching terrible DVR'd TV. And writing lists and making plans, some related to running (I still don't know when the damn NYC Marathon lottery is, beyond "some time after April 23") and some not (I am so definitely not eating any more pizza until this summer, thanks to a severely un-tasty Domino's experience this weekend). And some more vague, including this message written on my kitchen chalkboard:



Working on that too lately. Open heart, fingers crossed.

Life has been more an exercise in ridiculous than in running for the past few months, but I finally went for a run yesterday and I finally feel excited to go again which for me is like 97 percent of the battle.

I'm going to start blogging again (I made this Very Important Decision on my run), but it is probably going to be less just-running and more life-and-running. There are several reasons for the shift:

1. Running bloggers are annoying. Sorry if you are a running blogger reading this, but when I was training for Chicago I was super obsessed with a handful of running blogs and by the end of my training cycle they all made my brain hurt. Except for Ali on the Run. Ali I always love. (Confession: I still read some of them just so I can complain about them. Probably I need to stop doing that but it's haaaaaaaard. Because they are crazy.)

2. I am not currently training for anything. This probably won't last too long because I feel like I want to do speedwork and progressive runs and track workouts and hill repeats and all that good stuff and it's sort of pointless to do that long-term without any race aspirations. But I am woefully out of shape at the moment so for right now, I am just running to run. Even typing that is thrilling. It's a very happy place to be for the time being.

3. I am in the lottery for the NYC Marathon so we'll see what happens there. I think it's next month. You can tell I'm way on top of things.

4. I like writing about my life and haven't had an internet place to do that in awhile.

5. I also like to post my photos and I haven't really had an internet place to share those in awhile either.

The end for now! Welcome to my new cheese-and-vodka-life-is-ridiculous-and-sometimes-I-go-running blog. Here, have a picture of my bunny:


taken on Christmas Eve. you can tell the holiday spirit really moved him.