Man, I Hate Running

So today was the 20 miler. The first one! After barely finishing, I soaked in some ice water and took a nap. I’m up, but I still don’t feel like doing much.  So basically the run took up the whole day.

My feet hurt. My legs hurt. And I just spent ten minutes filing down two malformed toenails with a rotary trimmer made for dog claws.

In addition, I’ve lately been losing circulation in my toes at around the 4-6 mile mark. I think I may need to go up a size in shoes (which means my feet have grown a whole size in the past year). There’s a hundred bucks. Wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t just bought a pair about a month ago.

I sort of remember this from last year. It’s kind of fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure I stopped running altogether except for the long training runs on the weekends.

So sitting here feeling all jaded, I remember our awesome fundraiser at Global Fayre on Friday night. Chris ran a marathon on a treaadmill out in front of the store and $1 from every purchase for the day went to World Vision. We had 9 children get sponsored and brought a lot of publicity to the store. And then afterward, Chris had to go and tell us all how proud he was of us and how we’re making such a huge difference in Africa.

I wanted to slap him. As soon as I decided that all this wasn’t worth it, Chris has to get all passionate and motivate me to keep going. I guess that’s why I’m on a team and not trying to do this on my own.

So I suppose I’ll keep training, try to lose a little weight, and see how the marathon goes. I only hope I can manage to raise some more funds. I’ve only got 140 bucks in so far. Please help me out. Hop over to my fund raising page and make a contribution. Time is running out!

• Distance: 20 mi.
• Time: 3:50
• Pace: 11:30/mi.

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Boredom

Life really is boring. Actually, we set up hedges around ourselves to make daily living as uneventful as possible. Right? We prefer things to go smooth and easy. We don’t want a really interesting drive to work. We don’t tend want to live out a drama. It seems like we all want life to be the flavor of a water chestnut.

Isaiah 40:31 “But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength. They will soar high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.”

It’s a familiar scripture, but it is taking on new meaning for me lately. The spiritual high of soaring like an eagle is great, but that’s not really how life works most of the time. We spend much more time running, and much more still walking. The boring stuff.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I work in a gray fabric box for 40 hours a week. But I am quite simply bored to death. And I’ve never been very good at the day-to-day life in general. I’m much better at the fun stuff.

This kind of discontent seems to be happening more often as I get older. But I’m only 30! What’s it going to be like when I’m 40? I can’t imagine. But it’s not like there’s another option. So I guess I’ll do what I always do. Go through the motions and wait on God to breathe some sense of purpose back into my life.