I do what I do

Running in Rome
Originally uploaded by juliainitaly.

I remember when my daughter was small she wanted me to be a check-out lady at the grocery store. The second option would have been a hair dresser. She didn't like what I did...though I think she still doesn't understand exactly what I do for a living. Here's a link to an article I wrote five years ago in an american running magazine. Sorry, the book will be in Italian. Maybe I can set up some sort of groovy english language website. I haven't really seen one of those for women...(you'll have to copy and paste the address, I still haven't figured out how to manipulate the html by hand on this site).

http://www.runningtimes.com/issues/00oct/corso.htm

Biorhythms

My biorhythm is out of wack. Quite frankly I don't really know how it should be but this is how it is: in the morning I wake up in a fog. Worse than a fog, I don't like to communicate with the world until at least eleven o'clock. This of course is impossible given that I have two children and a husband that I live with. So, after being called several times by my daughter to get my butt out of bed, I throw on whatever looks right for that particular season, walk to the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea, get the car keys and then bring my daughter to school - driving and drinking my tea. I stay alert for the rest of the morning, though it still does take me a few hours to be myself. Around three o'clock in the afternoon I get a little sleepy. Sometimes REALLY sleepy and I'll take an hour nap with the baby but I try to only do this in an emergency. Like when I realize that if I don't sleep for an hour the rest of my day is compromised. Then something awful happens. I wake up. Usually around nine p.m. So I start to do things. I'm self employed so it usually involves working or writing, other times it involves snuggling on the couch with the husband while we watch satellite television with a choice of 400 stations in three languages. I could literally stay up until three or four in the morning but I don't because then I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning and it would start an endless cycle...which I think has already happened. It does cause me to go to bed later though. I rarely go to bed before midnight. I am not happy with this whole set up but it's really difficult to change.

I read a magazine article that said to just establish a consistent schedule of getting in bed at 10.00 pm and getting up at 6.00 am. I've tried it this week though it has been more on the 10.30 pm - 7.00 am side...It seems to be working. My energy is a little better, but I do have to find a new time for writing (part of my profession) which always seemed to come out best after midnight. Gotta go, it's now 10.25 p.m. and I HAVE to try and change this one aspect of my life...

What exactly do you mean?

Trieste
Originally uploaded by juliainitaly.

I was on the phone yesterday with my friend...She lives about two hours away from me so we actually don't see each other very much but she's good about keeping in touch by calling me often. We were talking about fall marathons. She's decided that she'll be running Berlin at the end of september after doing NYCM four times. She is always bugging me to train her, which I have on occasion but the thing is is that she never follows the program. She always has some little excuse why she couldn't do, complete or even think about starting one workout. BTW, she is single without children and has plenty of time on her hands. Then later she'll complain that her timing wasn't very good and maybe I could train her...it's a never ending merry-go-round. Yesterday I told her that I was going to run my marathon in mid october near home. It's a nice course and I don't have to worry about whether hubby is out of town or not. I told her if she wanted I'd send her what I was doing so if she wanted to follow along she could. At the moment we are almost running at the same pace though I'm probably slightly faster. (Note: no effort on my part to just send an email with my schedule...) I told her I'm looking to go under four hours for my Boston qualification. She thought about it for a minute and said, "Well, you are older than me..." Yes, by five years. What she was meaning to say was that if I, the old bag could do it, she could too..."And fatter..." I didn't say anything. I just thought about the last time she saw me was probably last year...I really can't remember but it was probably a good five kilos ago. But still, how dare you! Some people have no tact. It only fires me up more to do better at this next marathon. I've included this picture just to show y'all that I bitch and complain about these last five lbs all the time but the reality of it is I am in pretty darn good shape...for an old lady that is.

42.195 km (!)

I ran my marathon on Sunday! Since I wasn't really sure how it would go I decided that I'd run the first 21 km loop and then evaluate how I felt. Well, I felt great. There was a lot of wind, it hailed for about 10 minutes really hard. Then it rained a bit and then the sun came out. If we'd had a snow blizzard it would have been complete. The biggest problem was that when I went onto the second 21 km loop nobody followed! Most people were there to do the half marathon and there were only about 300 participants in the full marathon. It was tough with the wind and being alone because I didn't have anybody to run with to help me block out the wind like I did on the first loop. The great thing was that I always felt like running and I passed a lot of people in the last ten kilometres. I ran the last kilometre pretty fast and had a huge smile on my face. My final time was 4h21'15". Now I feel really energized and ready to train the whole summer for my next marathon which will be on October 15th. Can't wait!

My Secret Garden

We bought a new house a little over two years ago and one of the main features was that it had a 200 square meter garden. It's not a lot, but I didn't know much about plants so it seemed like a manageable size. In the Condo there are three other houses with a garden, one with the same square footage as ours. While everybody else just called gardeners and had them install a ready made garden, hubby and I wanted to plant it ourselves. Mind you, we really didn't know much about plants or design or what would grow, but I figured it couldn't be rocket science so we started planting.

One terrible behavior I have that I hate hate hate is to buy seeds that I never plant. I'll buy like thirty packets of various flowers that never even get opened. This year I tried to "examine" this peculiarity of mine and decided that it was because deep down I did't really think that I had a green thumb. I don't ever expect the seedlings to sprout. This year I got my courage together and planted some. Twenty different varieties, actually. I figured that if I didn't plant them how would I ever know if they would grow? Wouldn't it be like my weight loss? I just had to keep at it, adjust my mistakes and never give up. I am pleased to say that eighteen out of twenty flowers have popped up. I'm not giving up on those last two either. I think my main problem in the past is that I'd practically dig graves for the poor seeds when all I really had to do was set them on the soil and put a half an inch of dirt on top. I feel like a nerd 'cause I go and examine them about four times a day to see what's come up and how much they've grown. Not quite a green thumb, but I'm working on it.

On the weight front everything is going well, thank you for asking!