rain, rain, go away! new york is drowning in cold, greasy rain today - and we STILL got out there and ran! we put in a hard hour of running in an absolute downpour, and settled down for a huge brunch that was hard earned and delish. the rain alone makes today perfection for naps, coupled with an early rise and some miles behind us AND a belly full of corned beef hash - forget. i can barely keep my eyes open to type.
noteworthy: i (murph) am a faster runner now than i have been since high school. i can hold a sub-8 minute mile pace for 6+ road miles, which is really not that far off from a decent cross country team race pace. (by comparison i was running 9.5 minute miles for my marathon training at my fastest and most injury-free). i can hang in with the fastest runners on the team. it feels good to be fast. "train fast / race fast" is what they tell me, so here goes.
further: at the beginning of all of our saturday practices, we have what's called a "mission moment" where someone on the team shares their personal connection to team in training - usually someone in their family or a friend has gone through treatment (and, hopefully though not always, survived) or they work in the medical field. today, another survivor on our team shared her story and really put voice to a lot of the feelings i've had myself but had no words for. there is a language of survivorship that everyone can hear but to which there are levels of understanding - i mean, when she talked about missing the routine of doctors visits, checkups and treatments because it meant missing the assurance that she was being constantly cared for, people got what she meant but i was FEELING it. and she described TNT as a place where she can feel cared for and grow better at caring for herself in her new life and new challenges - again, i think that's what everyone joins TNT for so everyone understood the idea but it got to me on a cellular level. it's like i need proof that i'm not just back to my old life before cancer, but that i've grown somehow through it and because of it. cancer is a bad thing that happens to good people that i would not wish on anyone, but since it happened to me and i can't change that, i feel like i have a choice between having it hold me back or having it fuel me. TNT is a great place to fuel up and go farther and farther than i've ever gone before, onward into new life that i've never known before and would NOT know if i hadn't survived.
this blog was more for me than for anyone else out there - i'm not sure if i came across coherent or not, and for once i don't care too much. i'm still learning that language of survivorship i mentioned, and it's only through practicing telling what it's like that i'll ever even learn HOW to tell what it's like to be a survivor, or how to pay attention to how the meaning of it changes. so if you're reading over my shoulder here, sorry for anything inaccessible. i'm just getting access myself. -- jfm