Confidence on the way up

Today was a good day. I completed my first 5k since May 2011. It felt absolutely amazing!!!! I really was slow as mollasses and it was my slowest 5k ever, but thats ok. I dont expect to get back to my 6 minute pace that I was at in HS again, I would just like to get down to my 8 or 9 minute pace. I dont expect that to happen right now, as I need to continue working on my endurance first. The best part of today was just really enjoying the run while it was happening. Another good thing happened when I got home from the race. I walked into my bedroom and saw my running trophies from HS/college. With my confidence down this summer and lately, there have been numerous times where I have looked at them and felt dissapointed in the person I have turned into and felt like I was letting soo many people down (this has gotten better as I have stopped worrying so much about others but it still happens on occasion.)To be honest there have been a couple times where I even doubted if I deserved them. That was on my worst days. Today I was able to walk into my room see those trophies and just feel proud of them and of myself. I am also gaining more confidence which is allowing my positive attitude that I had in hs, to come back. I am beginning to enjoy my life again and not worry about the little things. I am looking forward to continuing to run and maybe by this time next year I will be ready to run my first half marathon???? I am finally beginning to feel like I have reachable goals again, and that is what will keep me moving forward that and the wonderful support I have and continue to receive from my friends and family.



My soul has known all along that running is what I needed to move forward but my mind is what caused me to be stuck with all of my doubts and negative thoughts.



I know its going to take a while to competely leave this "dark period" behind me, but I am ready to leave it behind me instead of letting it define me and change me.

Race in 3 days

Hi Everyone, Dont worry I am alive lol. Sorry it has been so long since I last posted on here. The school year has been very hectic. I have lost track of my goal to take better care of myself this year. My running (consistenly I have been running some) has been set aside not consciously but as a side effect of me not taking better care of myself. Earlier today I was thinking should I really run the 5k this weekend. But I have decided to run it. I may not be able to run the whole thing straight through, but I know I can at least run 5 minutes walk 1 for the 3.1 miles. I need to do this for myself. I need to give myself a present and that present is going to be not giving up on myself. On twitter I follow a group called real runners which just has lots of quotes and one that popped up tonight was "Sometimes I just need to believe in me". Right now that quote couldnt be more true. I was starting to believe in me over the summer but I slipped back a little I think. So tomorrow I am going for a run, and spending the night taking care of myself. I normally volunteer on Thursdays but am going to take this THursday off as I need to be selfish for one night. This weeks goal : Run that 5K on Saturday am.It is in Shrewsbury and I have one this course once before (if they didnt change the route) and I remember most of it is actually pretty doable theres just a big hill near the end when youre already tired. But I know I can do it. I will blog again after the race to let you know how it felt.

balance

So when I came on to the site to start my new post, I realized I havent posted since August 14th. I definitely didnt mean to take that long off, there just has been a lot going on. Both good things and rough things. Great end of the summer time with my family. Both sisters dealing with health issues. Mom getting into a car accident and on a seperate occasion ending up in the ER due to vertigo. What a month August has been. It also caused me to have some self doubts about myself and my running. It is slowly getting better. I mean I went for a workout this morning and really wanted to go for a run this afternoon too, but had too much stuff to do around the apartment and for work tomorrow. I dont know what caused me to doubt myself so much. I really wish I knew. I also lost my momentum on my weight loss journey, I did keep going down but only by .6 or 1. I am slowly getting back on track and am realizing that even though I want to make other people proud (I really do want to make them proud) The only person who really matters when it comes to making someone proud is myself. That is the thing that I need to keep reminding myself of. I also saw this quote today " When you stop expecting people to be Perfect, you can like them for who they are" -Donald Miller. When I saw that quote it kind of hit me in the gut, because I immediately thought of how I could change just a couple words and it could be "When you stop expecting yourself to be perfect, you can like yourself for who you are." I am still working on not expecting myself to be perfect. For some reason I have started expecting myself to be perfect every moment of the day. That expectation of perfection just isnt working. It is making myself even more stressed and makes myself even more discouraged in everything I do. This will be a challenge to me this year. The other thing that is a challenge to me this year is taking care of myself. I have always always put others before myself. It is just part of my personality, that I take care of other people. I love taking care of others. Somehow in the last few years I have lost the ability/knowledge of how to balance taking care of others with taking care of myself. To be honest, I have a very hard time even figuring out how to balance the two. But knowing the challenges I have coming my way this year I am going to have to figure out how to balnce the two. This next month I am really going to focus on myself and this 5k race. When I was doing xcountry I loved the feeling I got after completing a 5k race. I was one of the few girls in my grade to do xcountry (even in college the team was only 7 girls) so it helped to make me special. It also made me proud of myself. When I dont want to go for a run because I am tired I am going to focus on that.