It was nearly a year ago that I moved to the Green Mountains. I don't say we, and include my family, as my wife Kim and my daughter Corinne beat me here by over a month. I had to spend 6 weeks couch surfing in Minnesota before I was able to corral my dogs Asha and Jax and make that horrible, horrible drive half-way across this country.
Regardless, being here in Vermont has changed me for the better. I imagine in time some of those reasons might hit the blog. And I suppose I'll ramble on at times about topics ranging from family to medicine to politics to my work in Haiti to whatever. For now, this is an opportunity to focus on my running and the process by which I'm trying to get myself back. It's an opportunity to track my efforts. I'm not certain that anybody else will actually ever read this, nor am I certain that anybody would want to. That's all right. I figure that the more time I spend obsessing over my running, the more it'll happen, and the better it'll get.
7 years ago I left Western Mass and moved to Minneapolis. Minneapolis is a great town, and I love it, but prior to that I'd been running in the Berkshires. I'd been in the best physical shape of my life, and now, looking back, perhaps the best spiritual shape as well. Living in the Twin Cities metro area was advantageous for a lot of reasons, but I lost something that until now, I didn't realize the significance of.
The first few months in Vermont were all about settling in. Shocking. In some ways, the settling will take a lot longer. I'm not sure how many decades before I can respectably call myself a "Vermonter". But I started running again this winter. This is the first time I've done so on any kind of long-term basis since residency. Not that you can't run in the Twin Cities. As a matter of fact, I would have to say it's probably one of the better metro areas in which to do so. But I didn't. Partly because I was building a career, and I spent much too much time doing so. Partly because Kim and I were building a new family. Marriage and babies are a considerable time-suck. Not in a bad way, mind you, but it requires rebalancing to do it correctly. I didn't. When I was a resident, my time fell into 3 general categories: residency, running, and goofing off. With only those 3 categories, it wasn't that hard to balance. Now I have a wife, 2 children, a job, 2 part time jobs, and a good deal of non-profit work that I do in Haiti. The day still only has 24 hours. I'm still prone to goofing off. So my balance got out of whack, and it was my running that suffered. Contributing to this was a nagging IT band syndrome, and a lack of "great" trail running. I ran trails in Minnesota, but never found anything that I really loved that was close enough to home to do regularly.
I'm now surrounded by trails. Amazing trails. And it's become more and more apparent that I needed them in a lot of different ways. Just any trail doesn't cut it. I need trails where I can't hear or smell cars. I need trails that go and go and go and go. I'm sorry, but 2.3 miles around a metro area lake sucks. I need trails that might include encounters with wildlife beyond deer and squirrels and homeless people. I need trails that are steep and rocky and demand respect. I need trails where 90% of the time, I don't encounter another human being. And so I run ... mostly with my ever faithful companion Jax. Shiba Inu's are not supposed to be off-leash dogs, nor are they supposed to be long-distance runners. I'm glad nobody ever told Jax this. Running with him is truly an opportunity to be able to observe joy in a physical manifestation. Just thinking about running with Jax makes me grin.
And I'm getting better. I'm happier. I'm a better person. I'm not as fat as I was. I'm more self-aware. I can't believe I hadn't recognize what I'd lost, but I did. Ironically, I've had conversations with Kim and stood on my soap-box about prioritizing, but the fact of the matter is that I've been bad at it as well. I'm sure Kim wouldn't classify it as ironic. Stupid maybe.
So here goes my blog. Here goes my re-prioritization in a form that I can come back to and look at later ...
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