I am going to take a month-long break from blogging. Today is August 16th…so on September 16th I will be back. There are some changes I want to make. One big change, I hope, will be my blog address–poor Mary Aplin has been left out for too long 🙂 My marathon is not until October 25th, so you probably won’t miss any more than a few mileage updates anyway. I’ll miss y’all…
Dear sweet little Mountain Brook family, with your perfectly coiffed yard, I am sorry for the pink tank top I threw in your azalea bushes. I am sorry that it is sopping wet from my sweat, but I threw it there in a state of desperation. You see, I was at mile 15 of my 16.8 mile run, and I had learned that my body was not made for such extremes. I was on the verge of tears from exhaustion. My legs felt like they were made out of an extremely dense brand of putty. I had a stitch in my side, limiting my already difficult breathing, from the Mountain Dew I had just chugged in a last ditch effort to take in some glucose and finish the d*$! thing. And that shirt, well, it felt like it weighed ten pounds, and I couldn’t bear to let my running partners carry the nasty thing–like they were begging me to let them do. A girl, who has had two babies and is watching her left-over baby pooch jiggle in front of her as she jogs through Mountain Brook, has to hold on to some last stitch of pride. So, I refused to let them hold it, and I chucked it into your bushes. I’m sorry. I’ll be riding by later this afternoon, when I have enough strength to move my legs, and if it is still there I’ll relieve you of it. Abby
I’d like to tell you one major negative about long-distance running too (at least for me). It does a NUMBER on your stomach. I spend all the morning after our long runs…and sometimes longer, worried to leave the close vicinity of my own potty. I have always had an iron-coated stomach; I eat what I want and things keep on tickin‘. But suddenly I understand all of you out there with “nervous stomachs.” And the even stranger part, is that rarely does anything actually…happen (this is turning into a simply lovely post), I just feel like something is going to.
And on that note, I’ll leave you. Here’s a picture of my sweet girls, just so you know they are still alive too. I did finally make it to the camera store this week, and wouldn’t you know they turned me away immediately because the don’t “deal with” Kodak products. You’d think, in this economy, a specialty camera store would deal with any kind of camera they could get their hands on.
I have been depressed. Like seriously, I have sat down at the computer several times in an attempt to say hello…just let you know some little thing that was going on…but I didn’t have it in me to make jokes, or relay some recipe or craft (that seemed petty and fake), or to land-blast you with the blackness of my emotion. Reading hasn’t helped…not even Oreos. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been doing a lot of laughing and loving and RUNNING (14.4 miles on Saturday morning, to be exact!!!), but I feel this constant need for companionship–chatter–to skew the sinking whirlpool I feel waiting in my chest, ready to suck me in as soon as I let silence prevail.
