storage of dreams

Innocent before it all begins

but once it starts, it doesn’t stop.

You try to run from it

but it pulls you back in every time,

making you gasp at its presence,

filling you in without hesitation,

burying you underneath the layers

of unbreakable matter.

But once the snow sets,

So the coronavirus has caught us all off guard. I feel you pain, trust me. How I loved being outside, going for walks, for runs, or just to the shop and back home. And now all I can do is stay inside and do home workouts alongside many youtube videos.

I know there are a few perks to it - staying at home, doing your things, having more time etc. But the downsides are clearly prevalent, at least for me. School has been shut down two weeks ago and now I suddenly became a student of an online course, haha. That was never my choice. I don’t really like it that much, but solely because of the fact that our teachers weren’t ready for this type of “distance teaching”. Some are good at giving us excercises to do at home, but there are several who just don’t know what to do. They recommend us a few books as an obligatory read and that’s it, help yourselves. Thanks a lot. But I mean I know it’s not easy. It is a very new unprecedented situation for them as well and maybe they handle their other courses better - I just happen to be a part of a course which hasn’t been very well thought of in the “online sphere”. I don’t really want to blame it all on them, but I mean there’s so many methods of online learning and so many options out there, and you just decide to ignore the variety a recommend a boring read. Well... I certainly am disappointed. Never mind.

I miss running quite a lot. I signed for my first race which was supposed to take place on 18th April. That’s a long time from now, I know, but the situation isn’t getting any brighter these days and thanks to the quarantine I can’t even go running outside without thinking “I should rather stay home”. I know some people do run. Good for you all! That’s great, really. I am just too aware of the amount of people living in my area, which don’t take the regulations from our government very seriously, and I’d rather not be fit for my race but safe than be sorry later. Maybe that’s a bit of overreacting, but I mean, if this is the one thing that decides whether I’m healthy or not, I’m all in. You probably get me though, don’t you.

So I spend most of my time at home, watching TV series (Hart of Dixie and Elite on Netflix), reading the Twilight Saga (oh lord, I know) and doing my homework. And working out, actually. That’s been a great help to my overall mood. I now have managed to stay the most consistent with my training I’ve ever been, but no wonder, I don’t come home late from school anymore so I have plenty of time to force myself to work out. I think I kind of learned to find joy in the feeling of it, which I am very happy about. I enjoy the feeling of getting stronger and surpassing my mental boundaries.

Although I miss school a lot and the routine it comes with, there is something about the quarantine which makes me think a lot. Mostly it makes me feel grateful for all the things we now aren’t able to do, so once this whole situation is over, I’m sure it will be amazing. But I’ve also realized how much time we waste thinking “we’ll do that later”. Well, I thought I would go running a day later and then you find out you should stay at your house and go outside only in the most important of cases. Wow. Nothing is granted, that’s for sure.

So here I am with another #running post. Not a long time ago I managed to complete my goal distance - 5 kilometers. The time was around 35 minutes so the pace is 7min/km, which is a very chilled out pace for me. I enjoyed it a lot, but at the end I started to experience a stark hip pain which lasted for two days after the run. I’ve done a bit of searching around the internet, but mostly focusing on a blog of a runner I trust - Amanda Brooks and her runtothefinish.com, which I have already mentioned in my previous running post. It might be not enough stretching, not enough exercise and mostly sitting a lot = just not being active enough to prevent my body from being surprised that it has to move from time to time. I thought that running three times a week is now a habit for me, so maybe I need to reconsider it all. I am quite good at stretching afterwards, but I need to do a warm up and “activate my glutes” apparently. Woah, it almost seems to be a science-fiction to be able to run quite a lot without having to know every detail.

I wanted to tell you one thing by this not really well thought of post (which I’m so sorry about, I have so many thoughts and I yet need to learn to concatenate them one by one to make sense) and the things is, that the distance you can run is solely in your head. It’s crazy, right? They all say it and we all don’t believe it. It must be, otherwise I can’t understand why it’s so easy to run 3Ks now when I know I can manage to do that, but I would never imagine that I would run them back in February. And a 5K? Never in a million years. And now? Here we are.

And how did I get to running 5 kilometers after being sure that it will take much more time to get to it? I went running with a friend. It was my first time to run with someone and not be on the road alone. I surprised myself a lot. We chatted the whole time, which I thought was unheard of. I expected to be too out of breath to even say a word, but I spoke in sentences and my brain actually allowed me to make much more sense when it was constantly given fresh air from being outside. We ran in a chilled pace, not really caring about it. I showed my friend the trails I run near my appartement and she was thrilled to see all of it. We ran to a church ruin, took a photo there and ran back through the wide streets of my city and then I stopped my app and it showed 5,24 km. I didn’t even feel tired after, it was just the hip pain, but I mostly end my runs because I feel like I can’t do it anymore. You know what? If you go running and suddenly it feels hard, there is a good chance that this feeling will go away in a few seconds / minutes with the upcoming downhill (or just not another uphill) and you will be fine. It’s not a growing curve, it’s a heartbeat curve. Sometimes you’re feeling fine, sometimes you’re dying, but if you stop now, you don’t get to find out if you actually could run more. How cool is that.

And something else - I used to plan my runs ahead. I know it works for many people and it probably might work for me if my brain worked somehow differently, but at this moment it doesn’t. If I go running with a long run in mind, I am not usually very good at getting to the goal distance. In the last few weeks I learned that every run is so different. There are so many things that can affect the run (how much you slept, what did you eat, your psychical state of mind, did you drink water today and so many more...) and one can not simply control all of them. And so I began to go out with a different approach: I head out the door and run as enjoyably as I can. It means not focusing on speed but focusing on seeing the surroundings I pass by, on enjoying the songs in my earphones and stuff like that. And it may change just right after I finish writing this post, but maybe there’s just one person out there who’s reading this and it helps him. Sometimes I feel like the weather is perfect and it would be a great long run - and I go out and it happens. Sometimes I feel shitty and lazy and only run for a little bit and that’s fine as well. I guess the speed comes with the time. Doing intervals ans fartleks and strength exercise will help as well, but right now I am enjoying the basics.

I wish my college thesis would be as enjoyable to write as this post. Keep running and mostly: take care of yourself. Things can happen quickly and you don’t even notice them coming.

“You don’t realize you have been stuck until you’re not stuck anymore.”

So I’ve never been the runner type. Actually I despised running so much back when I went to elementary school that I would find myself hating PE classes spent outside. Not that I was the worst in our class, especially in the endurance races I could finish like 4th out of 12 girls or something like that so not even below average, but we would run 1k or 1,5k maximum and you can pretty much endure such distance even if you can’t run, although it means feeling like you’re about to vomit when you cross the finish line because you’re not used to moving that fast for such a long time. (Oh my..)

And now I turned 20 and I thought to myself that I would really like to compete with my mind and become an actual runner, you know, handling the “5Ks” and not feeling like you might die any second. I actually knew quite a lot about running and how it worked before, I loved and still do love reading articles and listening to podcasts about running. It makes me feel like I am a part of a VIP club although I don’t belong to any yet. (If you’re interested I recommend “For The Long Run” podcast on Spotify hosted by Jonathan Lewitt and runtothefinish.com by Amanda Brooks) I knew the beginning would be hard, so I started slow - there is a nice trail exactly 1,62km long and it leads from my house to a grocery store. A part of it is through a park and a small forest, downhill and uphill. It soon became my “beginner’s route” and when I started feeling like I am bored and I should probably go further, I added some more meters. And it went fine. My mileage was not bad, I managed to get to 3km in like 2 months and not loathing it which I call a great success. Now I am kind of stuck because summer happened and I haven’t exactly trained regularly and I feel like I am right back at the beginning. But I won’t let it happen. I slowed down my last run and I could manage to get through 3 kilometres and not starting to lose my shit although the pace was quite bad I would never want anyone to see it on the app. And you know what? The run felt good. I went out in pouring rain and felt like a superhero for a moment there.

They say it’s dangerous to check your data once you have it. I run with one of the free running apps you can get for your phone (called endomondo to be specific, iťs by the brand “under armour”) and it’s great. It tells me anything I need to know about my run - how fast I ran, how far I ran, how many calories I burnt and many other things I don’t even care about. The scary thing about me is that I compare myself to anyone else very easily and I made the effort just now to change that. I am not obliged to be just like anybody else, I am making my way through this running journey on my own and all I have to compete with is myself - and that’s already a heavy load.

Somehow I had the urge to write this down and publish it somewhere and I am quite sure my tumblr is long forgotten by most of my friends, so I found it a safe place to put my thoughts into. I guess I will yet see if it had helped anyhow with my progress because I figured i am mainly stuck in my head, not in my body physique. Maybe this gave you a sense of familiarity because I bet I am not alone in this especially if you’ve ever tried running for the first time (like more often then once a year). So thank you for being here, my empty place. I quite needed the peace to sort it out in my head. I’ll see you next time I feel like I need to pour out some thoughts to no one I know.