I fail. A lot.

I realized the other day that almost all of my running posts have been about my successes.  So let's switch it up a bit.  I definitely have not been feeling the success as of late.

If you come to my blog for reasons other than my running posts, I do apologize.  My blog tends to mirror what is prominent in my life at the moment.

Failure.

I've been dabbling in it recently.  Up until this last week I had been doing pretty good with what I eat.  Then Easter hit and with it all the irresistible sweets and carbs that I find a hard time resisting.  Long story short: I didn't.  I didn't resist.  The scale proved on more than one occasion this last month that it knows my secrets.  Dumb scale.

However, I did reign it in a little - you know, eating enough for two people instead of five - always look for the positive!

I had been doing pretty good running on the treadmill.  I was a little worried about meeting my goal of running my upcoming 5k without slowing to a walk, but was starting to come out the other side of, 

"I may run it slow, but I can do it.

Today I ran outside.

And every last ounce of positive thinking drained out of me as I crawled and inched myself around the block.

Seriously?

I knew it would be hard.  I knew it was going to be quite a transition from treadmill to outside.  That's why I was giving myself a couple weeks to adjust (yeah, don't laugh).

I just didn't realize it would be THAT hard.

So,  I am back to, "I really don't know if I'm going to meet this goal."

I'm sorry this post isn't more inspiring.  But I also want to keep things real here, and the truth of the matter is, some days are hard.  Some days just really suck.  Some days you just feel like you will never get to where you want to be.

The trick is not staying in that place.

You get down.

You wallow.

You feel sorry for yourself.

Then you move on.

I once read a post by an extremely wise person that said,

Movement is life.

He wasn't talking about running specifically, but the message can very easily be adapted to any area of life.  

I started running track in Junior High.  I believe it was my first or second race where I had a bad fall.  A hard core fall.  Like blood running down my legs, laid there for several seconds before getting up, fall.

I still don't remember what happened.  I didn't bump into anybody, my shoelaces weren't untied, I wasn't struggling to breathe.  My legs just couldn't keep up and I fell.  I was mortified.  I didn't want to get up.  I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.  When that didn't happen I did the only thing I could think to do.

I got up.

I ran (hobbled) to the finish line.

And I crossed it.

I didn't think much of it at the time.  I was so embarrassed by the fall in the first place that it was all I thought about.

Then I realized everyone was congratulating me.  Everyone was smiling and clapping and cheering!

I kind of wondered if maybe they didn't see my embarrassing performance, or maybe they felt really sorry for me.

But THEN I realized they weren't cheering out of pity.  They weren't cheering because they missed what happened.

They were cheering because I got up.

They were cheering because I kept going.

Because they all knew what it took to keep going in the face of failure.

And so, with this in mind, I will move forward.  I still have two and a half weeks to the 5k.  I'm going to give it my best shot, and my best is all I can give.