The "athlete within" (or Defying Gravity... literally)

So it's on.

I've power walked over 30 km this past week and several times, I have had to stop myself from starting to run. I could feel 'the run' welling up within me and I thought that I could explode from the joy that I felt. I'm of the mind though that if I want to set my sights on a future marathon, that I have to stick to low impact activity until I've lost some weight.

OMG - I have not felt this good in a long long time.

I have returned to living in my body and it feels like home. I don't know whether this makes any sense or not, but I tend to live too much in my head and yield to my baser emotions which results in a rejection of my physical self. Even with all the extra weight I am carrying, I somehow feel light in my body. This is in contrast to trudging through my life, a self-destructive/self-hating blob of fat.

While I have been away from work, I have been striving to let go of no longer needed baggage. As it is told in one of Jesus' parables (I am no theologian, so I could have this terribly wrong... but anyway), following much knashing and grinding of teeth, I am (finally?) burning the noxious weeds that have been allowed to grow in my field of beautiful golden wheat.

I am reconnecting with my humanity which is resulting in connections with others. The heart is mending.

Six months ago, I sat in my therapists' office and opined that I could see nothing in my future except blackness. Now, I see bright, vivid colour, and I'm letting myself believe in all kinds of possibilites.

Many years ago, during another really healthy time in my life, I developed a concept of the "athlete within". I understood this athlete to be the mature and competent man that I know I am and I am so grateful that this "athlete within" is emerging once more.

I'd much appreciate links to other blogs written by emerging runners or runners who have faced enormous challenges to live their marathon dreams (older runners as well). Without a doubt, the mountain before me is steep and there are going to be consequences to be paid for planting the weeds, but I'm resolved to give it my all.

"So if you care to find me,

look to the western sky....

And nobody in all of Oz,

no wizard that there is or was,

is ever going to bring me down...." (Wicked)

I BELIEVE I CAN.

So don't be afraid...

Today's sidebar (and the title of today's post) is a clip from the Closing Ceremonies at the Gay Games in Chicago in 2006. I wept as I watched, recalling my experience at the Games in 1994, when Ms. Lauper performed at the closing ceremonies; singing Girls Just Wanna Have Fun with about 100 drag queens.

I SO need to do this again!

I can FEEL the desire welling up from within.

I BELIEVE that my true colours are still deeply buried and the person who wears those colours deserves to emerge into the light and LIVE.

So - I'm throwing down the hammer as some of you say - I'm starting to train baby....

Cologne here I come.

I have a lot of work to accomplish in 2 years - but something tells me that this is a pursuit worth throwing myself at.

That was harder than I thought....

So, two weeks of my month long vacation/sabbatical are behind me. So far so good. The demons are grumbling that they want to come back out and play but my renewed committment to healthy(ier) living is pretty much shutting them up. It's about time.

So far this week, I have logged 19.4 k in fitness walking (and probably another 5 k getting from place to place), 5 hours of meditation and yoga and 10 minutes on my new elyptical. Huh, just 10 minutes? Perhaps, it's a good thing I didn't know how hard it would be working out on an elyptical until after I bought it and had it installed. Truly, baby steps is my mantra du jour. I can't be hard on myself for only being able to do 10 minutes. Rather, I need to consider it a starting point - 10 minutes today, maybe 11 minutes tomorrow and so on.

My inital reaction to my new elyptical is that I really miss my treadmill. Sadly, it had to go because my neighbours started complaining about the early morning noise of the friendly giant in #423 pounding the running board (why they waited for 2 years to complain is beyond me). At first, I thought I could retrain myself to work out at night but if I have learned one thing about myself, it's that I cannot will myself to work out after my work day is finished. As I have written before, I would be all to happy to live my life at 5:00 a.m.; a time of the day that is anathema to the forces of self-destruction. Clearly, not working out played its part in the dark and nearly tragic drama that has been my life for the past 18 months or so. In the circumstances, I was forced to conclude that it was too expensive of a toy to be used, not for its intended purpose, but rather as a clothes rack that doubled as a comfortable bed for the cats (it was too funny watching my James give me the evil eye for taking it away. For several days, he layed on the living room floor in the exact spot where it was positioned - and if you know cats, you know that he was sending me a clear fuck you statement).

So, I think my primary goal for the next year will be to concentrate on gaining aerobic strength using the elyptical and perehaps do some swimming and if I can get a bunch of weight off, I might be able to start doing some running next year. I really hope that this can happen because I am starting to fantasize about going to the Gay Games in Cologne, Germany in 2010. One of the highlights of my life was competing in the Games in New York in 1994 and I so want to have that experience at least once more in my life. Although never say never, I doubt that the marathon is in the cards but maybe I can manage the 10k?

This leads me to another confession: towards the end of my dance with devil, I started to smoke cigarettes again.

YYYYYYYYUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKK!

What a gross and foul habit. I am having a really really hard time with this given that I had quit for about 2.5 years. I suppose it could have been worse - I only started again at the tail end of the slide and I'm confident that I can quit again without too much fuss. If ever I want to know why 10 minutes on the elyptical feels like such a challenge, I need to look no further than the stupidity of smoking cigarettes. It is the more amazing given that I had a conversation just a few months ago during which I commented that I didn't think I could smoke a cigarette if someone was holding a gun to my head. More amazing still, is that I wasn't craving cigarettes. The first relapse was an isolated incident that just happened one night; I went to the store for potato chips or some such and when I was paying, I just blurted out, small Players Light King and before I had a chance to stop myself, I was ripping open the package and had one lit almost before I was out of the store. Although it took several months, I didn't really start again until early June when my work stress was particularly acute and I was desperately worried about the general state of my life and the escalating impact of my self-destructive behaviour.

My inner demons were particularly pleased with this turn of events. The good news is that I know without a doubt that I will be a non-smoker again. The experience of not smoking for so long will serve me well as I get it together to quit once again.

On other fronts, my return to yoga practice is going really well. I stayed away for too long because I knew that I would feel really self conscious and started to believe that I wouldn't be able to do a downward dog pose if my life depended on it. For me, the best thing about yoga is that it is not competetive and doing anything is better than doing nothing at all. It totally helps that a respected teacher has opened up a new studio in my neighbourhood and thereby removing the excuse of having to travel out of one's way to practice. As well, my firm agreed to let me use my gym membership benefit to pay for classes.

The benefit of a yoga/meditation was particularly manifest in my life yesterday. I woke up in the morning feeling all out of sorts and particularly lonely. I went out for coffee and a bagel on my way to the studio and was desperate for an excuse not to go. Had I not have gone, I know only too well where I would have ended up. The good news is that I forced myself and saved the day.

All in all, things seem to be getting back on track.

Thanks so much to Katy for her feedback on my recent post - I have shared it with my shrink and a therapy group that I have joined and they all agreed with her and had a good laugh to boot. If ever I get up the nerve to do standup comedy (which I would really love to do someday) I will surely use this as material.

BELIEVE

So, what happened?

Today's sidebar offering is a video of Elaine Stritch singing "Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch" from Sondheim's Company. Ms. Stritch (is she not just too freaking fabulous for words?) originated the role of Joanne on Broadway in 1970. Although I've never had the privilege of seeing it, I frequently listen to the soundtrack, and the following lyric somehow captures the essence of who I am, where I find myself and, why I went away:

"HARRY: You've got so many reasons for not being with someone,

but Robert, you haven't got one good reason for being alone."

It amazes me (and perhaps the brilliance lies therein) that one line can speak so much truth.

You see, I live behind thick emotional walls borne of fear and shame that stubbornly refuse to fall despite years of therapy - a part of the puzzle of my life that I just can't seem to resolve. Not that therapy has been a waste. Quite to the contrary. It's just that it has taken years of scrubbing my soul with SOS pads to get to the dense and murky depths of my soul where these particular demons live.

So as the story goes, about a year and a half ago, I was in a place where the scab got picked and I just couldn't go there, effectively giving permission to my demons to run amok. Boy were they happy because within me, they were assured a host who would provide them an excellent place to party right on. I vividly remember a particular yoga class during which I actually felt my heart open and I started to weep. In that moment, I was as human beings are meant to be - alive, vulnerable, present and in the moment. If you recall, my last blogs were all about yoga and health and letting go of body image issues (physically, my walls are comprised of fat and the effects of willful self-destruction). Well, my friends, to get there, one has be willing to, as they say, lean into the pain and deal.

Now, to be clear, I don't believe that all of this happened in the space of one yoga class - but during the winter/spring of 2007, I arrived at the proverbial fork in the road and I skipped down the path to Hell because I just didn't have the courage (or whatever else one needs) to walk a journey of love. Moreover, at least some of this can be attributed to that old canard, the mid-life crisis (if only I had spent the money on a little red sports car....instead of on.... ummmm... ok then, moving on....) .

All the while, I was dealing with the stress of my job, the aftermath of a national political leadership campaign and the death in April of 2007 of an unlikely best friend, Marie. She had moved away (to live with her daughter) several months earlier, following the death of her husband, only to find out that she was full of cancer. I never got to see her again or to say goodbye. There are days that I just want to scream at God for giving me so much death and loss to deal with. But, I know that have not been singled out. As my Mother once said enroute to a cemetary - I'm afraid that if I start crying, I won't stop.

I write none of this to feel sorry for myself to throw myself out as a victim. I blame no one for this state of personal affiars - I learned a long time ago that I am responsible for my choices and actions... the good and the bad. It's just that my sack of hammers got too heavy and I couldn't cope - so I did what I know best - I tried to avoid the pain by escaping to imaginary fantasy worlds (quite lovely in the beginning) that one can only get to, by doing things that I'm neither proud of nor that I can describe in a public blog. Suffice to say, I'm lucky that I'm still alive. I come to this tendency to escape honestly; it is after all the way I survived childhood. It's not that I was ever actively suicidal (that's just not how I roll), but I sure didn't much care if my days on the planet were numbered as the result of my own negligence. For way too long, I worked during the week (full of fear and anxiety) and once Friday arrived, promptly set about to free myself from the desperation of living that engulfed me. What a sorry assed existence, let me tell you.

Fast forward - this behavioural folly eventually led to the dead end that I could have predicted it would lead to when I chose to go down that road in the first place, and the drama became more of a problem and more painful than that which I was trying to escape. So, I sought out help, took a trip to New York, moved into a fabulous new office (I know this is shallow of me, but it's really big.... alas, on a more humble note, it is big by accident and not by virtue of any real or imagined importance), arranged for a month long vacation/sabbatical, and here I am.

The important thing for me in all of this (and I hope for anyone reading): Even though I knew on some level that I was risking death, I persisted on the road to self-destruction because I decided that it was appropriate to beat on myself for taking a road that I had already taken more than once before and that was getting me exactly nowhere. However, this time round and relatively early in the process of getting help, I came to an ability to see the past year or so as just another leg of the journey; a journey from which I expect that I will emerge from better and stronger than before.

It has been a journey that has taught me much. Having found myself in middle age (and btw, would somebody please explain to me just how the fuck that happened so quickly - just yesterday, I was 21....) I have decided that the point of living is to be authentic and to live my life as the man God created me to be.

I am currently of the mind that to do so, or at least to try, is to live a life without regrets.

So, it's back to yoga, trying to eat properly and hopefully start training again. Early days, but I BELIEVE I WILL.

Totally Fucked

I apologize to anyone who has worried about me since I stopped posting over a year ago. It will take a while to explain, but for starters, this is where I moved to when I stopped blogging and continued to live there for way too long:



























That's right - in total and utter blackness. Competing in the Ironman Descent to Hell (the point being is that unlike the true Ironman contests, the point of this race is that everyone who enters is guaranteed to lose and many will die).

Although I started to move out of the pitch black of Hell sometime ago (btw, not somewhere you go after you die), I think that my return to some kind of conscious living really started to happen in April when I saw THE MOST AWESOME AND INCREDIBLE BROADWAY SHOW EVER IN THE HISTORY OF ALL THEATRE - Spring Awakening. Talk about a life changing experience. The title of this post is the title of one of the songs from the show, which is on my sidebar (I wish there was a better version on YouTube but I couldn't find one). As I hope to be able to share with you over time, while I was living in the land of the hopelessly lost losers, I ultimately reached the point where I knew that I was totally and utterly FUCKED!

Now, this show has everything that a good broadway musical needs to have: teenage pregnancy, child abuse, back alley abortions, suicide and gay characters. But for all the sadness and tragedy it ultimately delivers a message of hope and inspiration that had me almost drowning in my own tears and snot - only several rows from the stage and close enough that I'm sure the actors could hear me. For me, I understood it's meaning to be that regardless of where you find yourself in life, no matter how hopeless the situation appears to be - you must go on. If it's not already, it will be touring soon. If nothing else, in that moment and the moments that followed, I knew what true and joyous happiness felt like. It is hard to believe that the play on which the musical is based was written in the 1890's.

The day after seeing it, I found myself wandering Central Park on an exquisite spring morning - and it dawned on me that I was experiencing a spring awakening of my own; that, in fact, I had moved out of the madness of addiction and self-destruction and was looking for more suitable accommodation. To be sure, if I do get going again on this blog, this awakening will be one of the themes as I continue to stitch together the threads of my heart too many times broken. It may one day be about running and training, but for now it is going to be about my quest for healthy living, healing and about learning how to be ever more authentically myself.

The experience was all the more memorable, as I happened to be in New York during the Broadway Cares Appeal and in exchange for a $350 donation, I got to go on a guided tour of the backstage area with the three leads, Jonathan, Leah and Blake. The three of them were AWESOME! I have a great picture of the three of us backstage but alas, the upload image feature in Blogger won't let me.

I hope that some of you will want to share my journey with me - the hard times may not be all the way behind me just yet, but I BELIEVE (Thanks Spence:)) that I am back on the right road and moving ever forward.

Namaste.