Just Googled it. Yup, it's summer. I LOVE summer. I spend weekends employing any excuse to get out of the house, often just standing on my doorstep doing nothing bar grinning like a moron who's never experienced daylight. My weekdays then comprise of staring out the office window and waiting for the imaginary bell to ring that means I can turn off my computer and go out to play.
Summer reminds me of one of the main reasons that I love running. It's the perfect way to be outside and not just creepily smiling at your neighbours from your doorstep with morning hair. People think you're being all productive and healthy and shit, when all you're really doing is getting high as balls off of mother nature's brightest lamp. This week has been glorious, and I feel effing marvelous!
Yes, I am aware that I might have mild s.a.d. Grey clouds depress me, and no one should ever cross me if it's windy out. Oof.
Last week (a crappier week for weather), I was my own lazy twin. I was lethargic and stressed, and all I wanted to do was glare at the TV and eat leftover Easter eggs until the mess around me decided to clean itself up. I convinced myself that it was a busy week. I was too busy. Work and boring, domestic chores were mounting up, and I didn't have time to run. Mundane, everyday tasks and their sheer, bloody endlessness were getting to me, and I just wanted to drop everything and sulk in a hole until all this being-a-grown-up bullshit passed me by. How people who reproduce manage to take care of themselves as well as other humanlings is beyond me. I find it hard enough to point myself in the vague direction of work at the right time every morning.
I may also have been PMSing, but this is wholly beside the point. However, it would go some way explain the fact that everyone I spoke to's heads turned into chocolate eggs right before my eyes.
Yes. Moving on. After a week of self pity and doing everything from laundry to making food so that I could, y'know, live and stuff with way more unbridled fury than strictly necessary, a friend and I went for a ten mile run.
And I felt instantly better. After my knees remembered how to be knees, anyway. Once I'd had a snack and a little sit down, I chased those up with an epiphany. I will always have time to run. I'm amazed at how the busier I get, the more sedentary I become. Paperwork, phonecalls, office work etc require being sat on my backside. I complain that I don't have enough time, and yet I spend so much time fuming over the fact that I have so much to do that I don't get on with actually doing the things.
Running has this magical ability to give me time. Not only is it likely to add years onto my life (fingers crossed no buses!), but it improves the rest of the free time I have by making me more physically and mentally able to get on with life's dull stuff. It puts me in a good enough mood to have me chuckling along to Netflix on the iPad when I'm doing the dishes, and gives me enough energy to bounce my way through whatever else the rest of my day has in store. And weirdly, because I boing from activity to activity after I've had my five or six miles, I find these strange extra pockets of time I didn't know I had before. I'm not sure how it works.
Obviously, I just run so fast that I manage to bend time. That must be it.
Am not jogger. Am time machine!!
