100 Days of Wonder – #35
Weekends will pretty much be dominated by running from now until January. The Dopey Challenge is getting closer and every now and again I do think that maybe I have just lost the plot. I ran 10 miles last Sunday and tomorrow the plan is for 13. Today’s picture is from the 2016 Disney World Half Marathon. I blogged about the race here – excuse the typos, I was really tired and I never have gone back to edit. It is probably the first half marathon I actually really enjoyed. I thought that to try and ease some anxiety about tomorrow’s long run, it would be good to access that memory bank and think about the half marathon’s I’ve done and how actually it is probably my favourite race distance. As I was scrolling through pictures my mind turned to the absolute absurdity of it all. I came to Disney as an adult, I came to running (well any exercise really) as an adult and I hated running when I first started. Disney made running seem less like something proper grown-ups do and more like something you could have a go at just for fun. Somehow Disney and running are not inextricably linked for me. The training plans worked for me, having an outrageous goal like the first half marathon in 2013 and then the Dopey Challenge in 2016 worked for me. But really. It’s ridiculous isn’t it. I’m 45, I’m fat, my lungs have been hammered by Covid, I’m pre-menopausal and quite busy at work. None of that lends itself to doing things like the Dopey Challenge. Yeah sure, I’ll just train to run 48.6 miles over 4 days through the autumn and the dark short winter days while constantly overheating, having random sleep patterns, random anxiety, random aches and pains, covid lungs and while carrying a significant chunk of excess weight. Sure, why wouldn’t I. It’s outrageous and stupid and more than a little bit mad. So why do it? Well, because it’s impossible. And most of the time doing the impossible is kind of fun. Everything is impossible until you do it and it turns out that actually, I’m quite good at impossible. So, 13 miles tomorrow. Given how training has been going that feels impossible. So I’ll see you on the other side of it! Go grab your impossible and have fun.
100 Days of Wonder – #34
So after the Halloween interlude, let’s get back to Disney and wonder and joy. It’s my work anniversary today. A year ago I joined my current employer. As you have noticed by now, I don’t need an excuse to reflect, nor do I need an excuse to scroll through Disney photos. I hadn’t picked a photo for today so I scrolled to see if something caught my eye. For some reason this one did. The bit of the Magic Kingdom in the picture doesn’t exist anymore. The photo is from 2006. Looking at it, it seems to me that Piglet is almost certainly about to fall out of the tree. Either that or he has an outrageously strong core. What you don’t know is that the next photo in the series shows Kath standing underneath this very fake tree with her arms ready to catch Piglet. So many times over the last 10 years (probable since forever really) I have just had to let myself fall, sometimes jump, and trust that the universe, often in the form of Kath, would be there to catch me. Sometimes what initially felt like falling was actually gently floating the the ground to bounce back in a different direction, sometimes it wasn’t falling at all but soaring higher than I could ever imagine and sometimes it was falling and landing hard and breaking in millions of tiny metaphorical pieces that needed careful putting back together. But what I have learned from that is to no longer be scared for Piglet or for myself. Falling is all part of our rollercoaster lives and you never know where you might land – maybe it’s somewhere where you’ll want to bounce up and get out quickly or maybe it’s in a ‘great big beautiful tomorrow’. So let’s stop asking ‘but what if I fall’ and instead ask ‘but what if I fly’?
100 Days of Wonder – #26
After the 2019 Dopey Challenge (if you googled that or clicked the link, yes you read that right, it is mad and 48.6 miles over 4 days is ridiculous), we took Dopey out to the parks to celebrate. You could say he went on a bit of a bender and there weren’t many sweet treats he didn’t try. For he, read we. It was an epic celebration of fun and silliness fuelled by good coffee, lots of food and some fancy drinks with lights and straws.
Completing a big impossible challenge like running races on 4 consecutive days with a marathon on Day 4 obviously warrants a big celebration but as I was looking through the pictures trying to pick just one (and failing, obviously), I was thinking about how celebrating the small stuff is even more important. Perhaps not always with a sweet treat or a light up drink but marking things completed, celebrating a job well done or giving yourself a pat on the back for holding your shit together are all worth consciously doing. So today I am celebrating 2 things: Senior colleagues having your back and students with brilliant ideas. And how? With a cup of tea and a small square of Ritter Sport chocolate, perfectly meshing together my German childhood chocolate with my oh so very English drink. It made for a lovely reflective moment and a smile in an otherwise busy day. Perfect. What are you celebrating today? And how?
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