Sunday 29 April 2012

Cheerleader's


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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