Even as a child, I remember making schedules for when my cousin Laura would come visit for a week. We would have exercise time, play with Barbies time, go outside and ride bikes time, etc. One Christmas, my family actually let me plan out our Disney vacation, and would gamely follow me around with my maps and schedules.
I would get so excited to receive syllabuses in college and tick-off each homework assignment. As a corporate attorney, I loved the junior associate responsibility of managing the closing checklist for a deal. Discovering that Microsoft Word actually has a check-box symbol that you can check and uncheck was life changing.
When I signed up for the marathon, I obsessively searched the internet for marathon training plans. It felt like Christmas the day Team for Kids finally sent us our training schedules. I had big plans of entering the entire schedule into my Google calendar, so I could access this magical item at all times, from all locations. Then, my injury happened.
Today marks week seven in the Team for Kids training plan. I have spent seven weeks with a detailed training schedule that I could not follow. If a day without plans makes me squirm, imagine what having a plan that you can't follow means for me. That damn schedule has been staring me down for seven weeks straight, softly reminding me that I am behind. It taunts me with all of its unaccomplished tasks, making me feel like a failure.
It doesn't matter how many times my coach, physical therapist or running friends tell me that I will be totally fine. In my twisted mind, all of that expertise and experience gets annihilated in the face of a written out schedule.
Injuries make you really confront your demons. My demon comes in the form of some major control issues. I like plans and checklists because they provide me with a sense of having control over my life. I'm afraid of the unknown, so I plan out everything months in advance. This means that I have total control over everything that happens to me, nobody can surprise me, and the entire universe bows down in the face of my expert planning.
Except, it doesn't happen that way. It has NEVER happened that way. You would think that by now I would have learned this lesson. But, as we all know, demons are hard to exorcise.
Well, the universe has decided to rid me of my demon (or at least try). It hasn't been easy, but I'm finally starting to view my life one week at a time. Hopefully, I will eventually be able to live one day at a time. Instead of feeling like a failure every day, I am trying to just accept where I am. I'm hoping to start a revised training plan this week. Will I still enter this training plan into my Google calender? Of course. But, I hope that rather than idolizing this plan as I previously would have, I will treat it as the tool that it is.
Today, I am happy and grateful that I ran 2.5 miles last Thursday, 3 miles on Saturday and 3 miles today. I have hope that I will do a full week of training this week. I will focus only on this week and leave all future weeks in the hands of the universe. I won't expect everything to be perfect and I will try to be flexible when there are bumps in the road (and there will be).
Okay, I will try to be at least half that flexible.
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