Re-prioritizing

Every time I get pregnant I lose the desire to be productive. I could curl up on the couch and read books for nine months and be completely happy, while everything falls to pieces around me. Since that's not really feasible, instead I take a hard look at some of the things filling my time and suddenly find great ways to streamline or cull things out that aren't important to me anymore that hadn't even crossed my mind just weeks ago.

Such is happening at the moment. I've been in a DIY kick for several years now and have tried my hand at lots of different things. I've made my own hair and skin and cleaning products, baked many things from scratch, and generally just found tons of ways to avoid commercial products. I'm feeling that come full circle of late.

I've never really wanted to be a loud advocate of the stuff I'm doing like I see on some of the blogs out there where they post these lifestyle things, but I have really enjoyed it. In case I did ever come across as holier than thou, sorry friends. It was unintentional. I do like the idea of using less chemicals. I have a pretty bad family medical history that I feel some urgency to avoid increasing my own risk for developing those diseases. But I also try things out because I enjoy them. When that enjoyment disappears and it starts just being a burden, it's time to readjust and check the priorities.

So I cloth diapered for a long time, through three kids. It was economical and worked. I liked a lot of things about it. But it's not working so well anymore with the current washer and sensitive-skinned kid. And the quantity doubling next year when baby number four arrives further discourages my desire to continue. So out it goes! I've been fiddling with different DIY shampoo/conditioner options for years. I've never found something that I can really say I love long term. So bye bye to that for now! Some other things are staying. I like making my own soap. I like making my own face products and still enjoy the experimentation there. The results I've gotten have been way better than previous store bought products. So that stays. What it comes down to is if I don't love what I'm spending my time doing, I'm reevaluating and making changes, and it feels good.

The Race

There was a time in my life where I identified myself as a runner. I ran a lot of races. I started to pick up some speed. I actually won the age division or was in the top three in some races. The coolest award I got was when I finished first in my age division at the Top of Utah Marathon and got a trophy that looked like a moose. It was hilariously awful and I kept it around for quite a few years. I really loved running and actually feeling like I wasn't limited but my height, which was my struggle in several sports in high school.

Once I started having kids running petered out of my life. I'd run a little here and a little there, but I could never get the distance up enough to hit that point where I remembered running for miles feeling like I was just gliding along. It's a pretty amazing feeling, but it turns out it takes a lot of effort to get there.

Aaron's pregnancy particularly laid me out. I had a mix of symptoms that completely worked me over and by the time I had him I could barely walk down the sidewalk let alone think of exercising. But about six months after he was born, around Christmas time, I had a conversation with my brother Josh and we decided that we needed to make a goal to race a race together so that we could both kick the horrible fitness we both suffered from. He had been working on his PhD for upwards of eight years or more and it hadn't been nice to his body either.

So off we went to start training for a half marathon. Bill was on board as was my sister-in-law Kelly. We made this little Google spreadsheet to track our times and it was awesome to see all of us improving and adding on the miles. There were quite a few hiccups along the way, but we aimed for a fall race, so we had a lot of room for those errors.

Unfortunately, three weeks before the race Bill suffered a stress fracture, so he didn't run for those three weeks and managed just one run the week of the race, which made him pretty sore, so he wasn't confident how the race would go.

Josh finished his PhD literally six days before the race. He packed his apartment up and drove it all to my parent's house in Utah from Texas and then turned around and drove straight through to our place in South Carolina. Literally he got two hours and 45 minutes of sleep Friday night.

I hadn't announced it yet, but this month I also found out I am pregnant, and the initial pregnancy exhaustion hit on quite a few runs, so my times weren't nearly as great as in training.

Basically all of us were a little shaky and uncertain but hopeful for a good race. And you know what? We did have a good race. A great race even. It was an interesting course that wound around some of the parks in downtown Greenville and felt a bit like in looping circles, but we never ran on the same trail more than once, so I was actually impressed with how they got the miles in. The race was the least supported long run I've ever done. It's only my second half, but I've done some marathons and I was surprised with how few water stations there were and I didn't see any bathrooms, but thankfully all of us did fine despite that. The stations they did have were great and the beginning and end of the race were really well supported, so I'm not too bothered. A gel would have been nice about halfway through, but we survived.

We were able to run together for the first eight miles before Bill slid back a bit. His three weeks off started to wear on his endurance. I was worried he'd hit a wall, but we found at at the end that he actually did pretty well, just had to slow his pace a bit, so that's great. Josh and I stuck together until mile 11 when he said we were at 1:43 and we might be able to finish under two hours. I pretty well took off at that point trying to attain that goal. I felt like this race I wanted to run together as long as it was feasible, so I hadn't run as fast as I might have earlier on, but I also didn't want to poop out in the last few miles, so I was very okay with the pace early on. However, when the opportunity arose to speed up, I found I had quite a bit of juice left, so it was fun to pick up the pace.

We finished the race by running a lap around the local baseball stadium. They announced our names as we came in, which was fun. I was in a bit of a dead spot, with no one around me, so I took the chance to really up my pace and try to catch the group ahead of me. It felt so good to finish fast. We didn't quite hit that two-hour mark, but I finished in 2:02, Josh in 2:04, and Bill in 2:15. Based off of the injuries, lack of sleep, and my pregnancy tiredness, all of us were super pleased.

They had tons of food and we all got medals and a mug and a shirt, so overall it was as fun race.