Living at the Speed of Life

Life has been coming at me fast and hard lately. There have been days lately where I feel like I'm just barely keeping my head above water. Then I decided to stop the madness...

Last week was Johnson County Fair week. I took Friday and Saturday of the week before off as entries are due by 11 am on Saturday morning. I also took Monday and Tuesday of last week off as the bake-off is always on Tuesday of Fair week. The bake-off theme this year was pumpkin...

 ...and then, for the first time in 26 years, I didn't enter the County Fair.

My heart just wasn't in it. I was tired. I had other stuff I wanted to do more. It is my life after all and I decided I shouldn't do things just because I've always done them or I'm expected to do them. Last year I was just crazy the week before the fair. This year, I decided to step away. I went and ran the Midnight 5K in Seymour Friday night instead of baking all night and slept in Saturday morning. Once I made a conscious decision I wasn't entering the Fair, it made me feel free to do other things. Since I didn't have to bake all day Monday for Tuesday's bake-off, we took off Sunday night after I got off work and went to visit friends at their lake house in Michigan. We played in the lake all day before driving home that night.

Of course we couldn't let Fair week go by without a visit to the Fair. Besides, my 900 year old daughter had an entry...

"Nights With No Sleep"

 



... and it won First Place and Class Champion for the Open Class Junior (4th - 6th Grade) Fine Arts category. I think this also further confirms that the child really is 900. What other child draws a picture of someone who can't go the sleep because she has a 3-prong socket in the back of her head and her pillow just has a 2-prong outlet? I didn't get it at first. I thought she was making some statement about not being able to go to sleep because of being addicted to your electronics and she had to explain it to me (as I'm only 45).

So, no Fair entries for me last week and this is how Week 3 of marathon training went...

Sunday - No running. Worked all day then drove to Michigan.
Monday - No running. Played in the lake all day; did some stand up paddle boarding for the first time.
Tuesday - 7 miles
Wednesday - 7 miles after work.
Thursday - 6 miles at 8:31 pace. Crawled out of bed at 4:15 am to run with a group to do this!
Friday - 5 miles (had 12 on the schedule and bagged it at 5)
Saturday - No running. Too tired after working all day.

Week 3 Total Miles: 25

This week, Week 4, was supposed to be a bigger mileage week. Well Saturday was the first of 5 work days in a row. Ended up putting in 55 hours in 5 days. Add in an hour commute each way and that equals too dead tired to do anything!

Running went pretty much down the drain this week. I had asked off for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as State Fair entries are due Saturday. I ended up getting Sunday off too and found out that the Culinary Arts entry deadline was also extended to Sunday this year.

State Fair entries require pre-registration so I had to decide back in June what I was going to do. Last year I entered 35 baked items. This year I decided to scale back and entered 17. I only have 8 items due this weekend; the rest are spread out throughout the course of the fair. Original plan had been to spend Thursday prepping, then Friday through Sunday baking, but... run a 5K in Scottsburg, IN (almost 2 hours south of me) on Saturday morning and a 5K in Columbus on Sunday morning.

Admittedly, this was pushing it time management wise. Then, I didn't have time to run this week. Then, my husband wanted me to drive him to the airport Sunday afternoon. Then, a co-worker had a family emergency and I picked up his Saturday morning shift. All signs from the Universe to back off some more... so I made a conscious decision not to run at all this week... and I felt like a thousand pounds had been lifted off of me and I could breathe again.

Why make myself miserable trying to do all the things that are suppose to be fun when pursuing "fun" makes me miserable?

Thursday was my day off after the 5 work-days-in-a-row from hell. I spent the morning running errands with the kids - eye doctor appointments, back to school shopping, lunch out, and grocery shopping. In the evening I trialed some new recipes...

                                                          ... and enjoyed it. Baking is fun when your heart is in it!

I plan to bake all my cookies Friday and take them to the fairgrounds. Saturday, I'll work in the morning then make all my breads when I get home. Sunday I'll take my husband to the airport, then my breads to the fairgrounds. Maybe I'll be ready to run again after that.

Week 4 Total Miles: 0

I am working on slowing down my life to enjoy it. I'm tired of trying to "catch up" all the time when all I'm doing is "catching up" on the monster that I created. Make sense?