Reminders

It would appear that I survived the surgery.  Well, actually that's probably a bit understated since I seem to have come out of it with nothing more than a 1 inch-ish cut, a few stitches and now (being less than 24 hours later) some mild pain and some crazy dizziness.  I attribute the dizziness to the pain medication I took before bed last night (I should have known better than to take two pills as directed), but the upside is that I have not taken any pain medication in 12 hours and am feeling pretty good . . . other than that annoying dizziness thing.  Definitely not up for running my 14 miler today, but I'm hopeful that maybe tomorrow or Sunday I'll be ready.  In reality, if it wasn't for the dizziness I would be at work right now and would be carrying on with life pretty much as usual.  Or at least, as "usual" as I could knowing that I have to wait a number of days before I find out if all of this was was to confirm that I have nothing or that there is a problem after all.

I've been lucky enough since the biopsy to be able to run pain-free and despite the schizophrenic weather we've been having, running has mostly been great.  I've had to carefully plan my runs around this surgery so that I didn't miss much training and was able to work everything in earlier in the week except for my long run.  It's hard to believe that the race is three weeks from tomorrow and that despite everything going on medically I feel like I'm ready.  It's a good reminder of how far I've come in the last ten years and how my personality refuses to allow anything to get in the way of my goals and plans.

That said, I have to face the reality that this is not the race in which I will break 2:00, and likely I won't PR either, but that's okay.  Right now I'm just happy knowing I've been able to persevere through all of this testing and plan my training around it and keep putting one foot in front of the other day after day.  I've also been reminded how lucky I am to live where I do.  There are many reasons, but I don't want to go on and on and on so I'll stick with the one reason why I even mentioned it.  I am so blessed to live in sucha beautiful place!  I was running my favorite trail run earlier this week and stopped in the middle of the trail for a moment and looked up.  This is a bit rare for me as I tend to watch the trail and I'm afraid of heights so I tend to not look around too much on certain parts of the trail.  So I looked up (after I had come to a complete stand-still, by the way) and took in the view and it was amazing.  I had forgotten that when my legs were screaming from all the uphill and downhill action, that meant that the view was of the deep-wooded hills, gorges and river a couple hundred feet below.  It was so peaceful and perfect and I realized that I need to stop more often to enjoy it rather than just pushing through my run.  Maybe next time I'll remember to bring a camera . . .