After nearly two months of blog silence, its time to jump-start this column.   This week I don’t have much to say, but the intent is just to try to create a little forward momentum.  I still hope to write a much belated review of my 100 miler back in late September.  But not this morning…

I’ve been in a bit of a funk since early October.  The day after I returned from Utah with sore legs, I dove in headlong into my thesis.  Long days and nights in front of books and Microsoft Word, minimal physical activity, and a diet of coffee, burritos, and snacks all took a toll physically and mentally.   It was a pretty shitty two months.

You’d think that after 8 weeks of this, I’d have a sense of accomplishment being done.  Accomplishment, no; relief, maybe.   Relief at being done.  I haven’t gotten the thesis back from the department yet, so the process is not complete quite yet.  I’m not particularly proud of the product I generated.

But perhaps there is a silver lining.  We learn more from our failures than from our successes, and until October, for the most part over the past 18 months I’ve experienced mostly successes.   In work, in my personal life, and in running, things have gone pretty well.  It was not until Oct/Nov that I really had to confront serious doubt and potential of failure.  Pressing ahead in the face of this was an exercise in resilience.  Every morning when I drove in to work in the pre-dawn darkness and parked near the academic building where I worked, I had to summon quite a bit of willpower to get out of the car and walk inside to my stack of books and papers.   In some ways, it felt like getting out of a warm aid station chair at mile 80 of a 100 mile race, to go back into the dark woods.  I’d take the 100 miler over a thesis any day though.

Like I said, I’m not quite out of the woods yet, I hopefully will find out more tomorrow (Monday), and be able to put it to bed.  In the meantime, I am focused on preparing for moving to Hawaii in January, and trying to pull myself out of the thesis-funk.  I have to create mini-purposes for myself, as the structure of work won’t be there until I check into my new job in February.

I’m reading for enjoyment again, cleaning up my diet a bit, trying to get a little upper-body strength back, and basically trying to establish routines.   I wish I could run right now, because the structure and purpose that it provides would be helpful.  The hip is not good though, so running is out for the time being.   Other than that, things seem to be roughly on track.