Put the Healing Before the Horse

Sometimes when you run a half marathon and your quads are shredded afterward, you feel good about it.  And sometimes you don't.
If you've prepared well, i.e. worked hard to listen to your body, pushed just enough, recovered productively, and laid out a mental plan, you've had a race of which to be proud.  In this case you relish having to hold on to the sink while lowering your tender glutes to the toilet.
Flip that coin over (your race did NOT leave you in a good mental or emotional place for various reasons), and you are cursing at the effort getting out of your car and crying at the sight of your foam roller.  You feel like shit and are annoyed with yourself, your exploded muscles, and gravity in general.
The mindset you take in your recovery is the lace that ties your good and bad racing experiences together; the way to approach healing your body is the same whether you've achieved a personal best time or walked through a windstorm when you'd intended to fly to the finish line.
Begin by honoring your body's need to heal and the time it requires to do so.  This includes letting your current level of fitness be and minding what hurts, when it pains you, and for how long.  Then you can determine when and how to be active:  maybe yoga, maybe a run, perhaps a nap.  To rebuild your workout schedule too quickly will only extend the healing time; train when your body feels good again, not just good enough.  You wouldn't accept an effort that's "good enough" in a race - don't allow that standard to govern your recovery, either.  If you don't have faith that you will heal, how can you ask your body to break down and rebuild as you gain fitness?
We are always in a state of healing, be it potential or active.  The human body continuously allows cells to die regenerates them, thus giving us the potential to recover from whatever might befall us.  In this state of potential healing, we can improve fitness, but only to the point which we believe (consciously and subconsciously) that we can rebuild our tissue and recover from training.  When we race or overdo it in a workout or a training program, we come into a state of active healing in which we can, at best, retain our current level of fitness, and at worst have to avoid our sport or activity of choice altogether.
Take each workout as  a real-time fitness yardstick:  What can I do today for my body?  Will my workout help me to heal or to improve my fitness?   Be mindful of whether your body desires a push to reap athletic benefits or simply to focus on regeneration to prepare for future workouts (which may in crude more healing and repairing until you are fully recovered).  Then, tear up the roads and the quads knowing you can trust yourself to bounce back.

A Great Cry

Sometimes I cry.  For me, tears are part release and part self-expression.  I do a lot of "Oh, that's sooooo sad" crying (what with the jets continually crashing and children continuously starving), and I also have spells of "Oh, that's soooo great" tears streaming down my face.  Which is why I just didn't sign up to run the Buffalo Marathon.  While I watched the promotional video on the marathon's website, sitting in my healthy, well-trained body, my mind confident from the successful 20-mile run I had yesterday, my heart began overflowing with emotion:  Love for my city, appreciation for being a runner, and a wealth of gratitude that came pouring out of my eyes and dripping onto my keyboard.  How incredibly lucky am I to live in a beautiful city filled with a familyhood of runners, and I get to run 26.2 miles through it, with them - shit, more tears.  If you're not a runner, check out the video and allow yourself to be inspired; if you do run, I dare you NOT to sign up for some part of marathon weekend's events.
I am ending this post abruptly so that I can sign myself up for real.

My Marathon

I am wife.
I am mommy.
I am marathon training.
I am selfish.
I am strong.
I am weak.
I am proud.
I am humble.
I am high.
I am low.

I am on a roller coaster, emotions magnified by miles. I give to myself on the road. I give hope and strength and endorphins and a muffin when I'm finished.
But I still need to take, to receive from others.  I need life to allow me to rest, to sit by myself, to snack when I need to snack.  I need a couple of quiet minutes to take a shit.  I need to feel supported.

And so, I

Cultivate patience
Radiate forgiveness
Cook for my family
Read to my children
Fix the throw pillows
Clean the toilet
Get up at 4:30 am, run, and do it all again.

I can only receive what I can give.  I only take what I release, only grow what I sow.

What is your marathon?

Whaddya Expect?

I'm good at a few things:  Baking scones, taking tests, packing for trips.  I find success in those activities without much effort, and I have come to expect good results with each attempt.  Running, however, does not have an "easy" button for me.  I am decent at it, but I have to work really, really hard not to suck.  If nothing else, for my training efforts this winter I'm going to have the strongest ankle muscles in running history (doesn't that just scream sexy?). 

When I was running Wednesday evening, my lower legs (for what felt like the 100th time) were straining to trod over the still uneven street and sidewalk surfaces that through the preceding weeks had been doused in snow and scraped, shoveled, semi-salted, and otherwise razed to create a potentially dangerous sort of race track.  In instances of physical challenge such as this, my inclination had usually been to fixate on the pain, worry about possible injury, and complain and fret until my next run when the pain would return, migrate, or lay dormant, waiting to strike (ahem, give me an excuse to bonk) during a race.  All this led to constant worry about any activity becoming the culprit of my next injury.  I had not only accepted running in pain (something always hurt when I exercised), but I came to expect it.  I had actually, without consciously trying, lowered my expectations to meet my injuries.  I had let the injuries become part of who I was, and they shaped my running identity.  I felt like I just wasn't put together for running, like I was a runner in a non-runner's body.  But I kept running. 

Back to Wednesday night:  The muscles around and above my ankles were burning with the effort of propelling my lower body over footprints, ice chunks, and garbage, but when my brain started down its old path of "this is bad"-ness, I got indignant and stopped in my tracks.  It was there, on Niagara Street, that I decided enough was enough:  I gave my bossy brain an energetic bitch-slap.  This winter running was going to STRENGTHEN my legs, CONDITION my heart and lungs and PROPEL my fitness to a new level.  No more hurting, no more fretting, and no more feeling sorry for myself, like a misfit toy, over how I was put together (and of course, I couldn't help but clear my chakras, too).

I had kept running through the pain because of what running could give me - stress release, calorie burning, a feeling of accomplishment, but I wasn't giving to the running.  I'm not talking training intensity or fidelity, I mean attitude and appreciation.  I needed to expect more from myself, rather than relying on running to provide me with an escape and a size 2 butt.  To put a spin on JFK's words:  Ask not what your running (or teaching/parenting/basket weaving) can do for you, really examine what you can do to improve your efforts holistically.  We can raise our own vibrational frequencies to meet our high expectations, and then we will feel more accomplished and be prone to continuing the cycle.  For me it was like stepping out of a snow bank and onto a sunny boardwalk.  And, it inspired me to write this post. Expect more like this one out of me - I do.

 

New Year, So What?

"New year, new you!" How many times have we seen that declared on a magazine cover or postered on the gym wall?  A brand new calendar year seems like an opportune time to get in shape, kick a bad habit, or plot a course toward any life goal.  But how many of us have made that resolution, broken out of the gate like gangbusters in January, and either given up before Valentine's Day or renegotiated with ourselves a simpler, more digestible attack because we hadn't really been ready for the change to begin with?

Anytime can be the perfect opportunity for change.  However, time itself is simply a modern, human regulatory constant - not the healer of all wounds popularized through greeting cards.  Since we can move forward any day, month, or season, and we really want to lose 10 pounds, ditch the antidepressants, or find a new career, what in the heck is stopping us?  We might not be aware of the impediments to our success.  If we want to finish a marathon, but on a deep level believe:  "I am not a long-distance runner" or "I am not a winner" then we won't even make it to the starting line. Can we simply create a mantra like:  "I can run 26.2 miles," repeat it when we're tempted to sleep in, or the weather's nasty, or we see the short cut home, and four months later have a marathon finisher's medal draped over our heads?   For most of us, the answer is no, because the question is not "What should I tell myself?" but "Why do I keeping telling myself I'm not good enough?"  We hold ourselves back because of an emotional blockage in our energy flow, a dense spot (or spots) in our chakras which harbors negative beliefs.
To use energy work to clear these "ill vibrations" in our energetic fields is even easier than muttering a mantra again and again.  We use kineseology to test where the negative belief is and if we are ready to release it (similarly to how we create a Total Body Analysis remedy), then direct healing energy to the identified chakra and the emotional blockage is cleared.  This technique complements TBA remedies by relieving emotional stress and allowing the body to shed toxic layers more quickly.  To quit smoking, we energetically locate the dense energy that causes you to smoke, dissolve it, and move on to any other issues you may want to eliminate or improve.  A TBA remedy helps our body detoxify what it can internally, and the energy clearing resolves the emotional ties to the internal problems - it's like we are excavating a mine field and deactivating the mines at the same time.
To realize you are holding yourself back and take the first step toward wellness and prosperity is resolution enough.  Well Vibrations is here when you are ready to train for, and finish, your marathon (read:  Put yourself into positive physical and psychological motion).  New moment, new you.

Decisions, Decisions

My husband is a great guy:  Dedicated father, gifted teacher, hardworking house cleaner, and talented runner.  Sounds ideal, but who cares if he's a runner, right?  Running may not seem like a typical highlight on a husband's resume, but it is a huge part of who Mike is, and running his tenth marathon last weekend (and the week preceding it) illustrates perfectly the topic of this post:  Total Body Analysis works wonders, but we have to do right by ourselves, too.
Put yourself in Mike's (running) shoes.  You have trained well, your wife/TBA Practitioner has helped keep you in top form with remedies, good food, and love, and you are just itching to hear that starting gun blast and then take off for another Boston Marathon-qualifying race time.
Except.
Your second grade students have hacked and sneezed on you all week, your own children are involved in a hundred activities, you had to stay up for those football AND those baseball games, your wife stresses you out with her own regaling of school day challenges, and you really, really like the new drink you've discovered, the maple old fashioned, but unfortunaley bourbon is not exactly a tonic for the immune system.  So, you develop a little cough, spend nine or ten hours in bed the Wednesday through Saturday before your marathon, load up on sprouted wheat pretzels, and hope for the best, really believing Sunday will be your day to shine for 26.2 miles.
The believing part is key; we have to believe we can succeed at something in order to bring it to fruition, but as we shall see here, belief and good holistic medicine can get you to the starting line, but to finish strong, you need to give yourself some TLC.  
But aren't my primary and general remedies detoxing, antidoting, and supporting my system???  They sure are, but any toxic energy that is layered on after we make your remedy will be a factor in how you feel.  So Mike's ever-present work stress got him down, and then staying up late and the occasional weeknight old fashioned knocked him out.  His remedies helped keep him from officially getting sick, but he was not in tip-top health for peak performance in a marathon (he finished in 3:27 - still pretty danged good).
It all boils down to making decisions.  We decide we want to be healthy, but wellness doesn't stop there.  It's an ongoing, active state where we're constantly pitching, catching, swerving, and righting ourselves as the days roll on and life's challenges and rewards unfold.  It is vital to have a supportive circle of friends and family to talk with about being and staying well and to continually think about the consequences of our daily habits.  Then we can make solid decisions about how to tackle what's in front of us with the big picture in mind.  You're reading this, so you have "meta-wellness," or thinking about being well.  Decide to take the next step:  Make a TBA appointment, down a kale smoothie, or just go to bed early, and rock on knowing you're ready for a strong tomorrow.