Do I have to write this every day between now and June 24Th? Oh to be less obsessed. There are no adequate words to describe the
weather here in Dublin today. Closest would be a mulch dense wet grey wind.
That still doesn’t quite convey the desolate bit. Luckily I had a training wing man this morning.
I am not sure I would have made it through the run actually. At one point I was
blown right and left and front and back and still couldn’t actually leave the
same spot and move forwards. Battling with the wind I think it is called. Darren has trained with me lots off and on
over the last three years; he has always been very supportive of all my
endurance endeavours. He always took part in the Spin cycling challenges I organised in support of
LIVESTRONG whilst working as an instructor at the gym, and he has come along on
many a cycle and a run that absolutely no one else would have done with me when
I needed a bit of training company in the past.
Cheerleaders come in all sorts of different forms, I just
looked up a definition of a cheerleader and it says “A person who leads cheers
and applause, esp. at a sports event.” And “an enthusiastic and vocal supporter”.
This word keeps coming up this week.
Well I keep bringing it up as well I suppose. Shu became my official
Iron man France Cheerleader the other day and then today my friend Henrike
another fellow LIVESTRONG Leader said that she is my cheerleader too. I
followed Henrike’s last two blogs whilst she was fund raising to do her first
half marathon for LIVESTRONG. If you sponsored
her she would then go out on her training run that day with the name of a cancer
survivor you nominated written on her arm. I asked her to run for my young
friend Donal Walsh and she did it twice for him, once on the roads of Germany
where she lives and again in Austin Texas last October. It was powerful and it
also reinforced to me that we can run for and also carry people if not maybe
literally but figuratively in a way that can feel very real and comforting.
Henrike is yet another leader I get so much inspiration from in all she does
for LIVESTRONG and in her unique way of doing it.
Marie Ennis O Conner another great woman, and who I mentioned
the other day said to me earlier that I am her cheerleader and so that was absolutely
why I had to look it up. What a great word actually. I think we all need enthusiastic and vocal
supporters. It can be hard what we undertake to do, and so when those moments
occur as they do so often when you are stretching yourself maybe as far as and
maybe even beyond what you can do, it is during those moments when our cheerleader’s
loud and positive voices resoundingly drown out our own doubts and
misgivings.
Earlier this evening I was on Face book, twitter, email and I
was texting as well all at the same time. Pretty much all of it was connecting
me in to feeling a little bit better. I don’t get this argument that social
media is diluting our connectedness to one another. For me it is filling in
even more dots, making all the white bits join up. We can’t always be engaged
in face to face conversations with people and then for those of us who live
alone well sometimes you just have to get on with it and there is nothing more
lovely than the pings and beeps that remind us that we are not alone.
Whilst we were running today Darren and myself starting
talking about our injuries, he also said to me that if anyone tells you that
you are not going to be in pain doing this, well they are not telling the truth. That is a
good straightforward bit of truth to hang on to. There are injuries we cannot train through
but there is also a degree of pain that is a given.
I got to thinking this evening about my 27 year old self, it
was actually because I was thinking about how sore my feet and back are. There
is that other saying I like as well and it starts like this “Dear 27 year old
me please do not be so prideful that you can rock the Parisian cobblestones
like no other in your super high stilettos. There will come a day when the
talent for serious cobble navigation and nights spent marching from one end of
that city to another will be cursed and not blessed. Lol
I don’t think I need
to say anymore. My thoughts took a slightly more serious turn though and it
took me back to what I was speaking of yesterday, the not knowing element whether
it’s preparing for races or life. When I
was 27 I got engaged to my French boyfriend who I rocked those cobblestones
with. If someone had of asked 27 years old me where I would be in 10 years’
time, I think I probably would have said something about having 4 children and
hopefully being able to finally bake like Bertrand’s mother and even more
importantly dress like her. Lol…this
evening 37 year old single and flat dwelling me got excited when she found a
left over already baked potato in the fridge and some salad and grated cheese
sitting close by. She then consumed this
whilst wearing a superman tee shirt...Quite.
You see you can’t know. It’s completely impossible to know.
I always talk about how in awe I am when I see people going through cancer
living as if they know everything is going to be okay even if they don’t. It is
such a good lesson though as we just cannot know. All we can hope for are some
really great cheer leaders and not too much rain next week as I actually have less
than 8 weeks to go in all of this…
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