Get 'er done

(Pre-script: To get the most out of this post, first click on the song, "Single Ladies," on the playlist at the bottom of the page, then come back here and resume reading. I'll wait...) (...still waiting...)

It occurred to me on the way home from the gym yesterday that I have increased my running time. I can now go a farther distance in a shorter amount of time...if you can trust treadmill distances and times...and I do. I would never have known that I had increased my time, if I had not been paying attention. By paying attention, I mean bragging. "Hey, guess what? I ran such and such miles at so and so pace today!" high fives all around! But the change has been slow, endurance does not happen overnight, so I could have just as easily missed it if I wasn't paying attention. But I was paying attention, for bragging rights, and look what it got me. Bragging rights...and a t-shirt.

At the gym where I owe the majority to my sanity, there is a wall of t-shirts. You log in your personal I.D. number when you get there, and you earn points when you work out, a certain number per weight machine, a certain number based on minutes of cardio time. At first, you get a t-shirt when you reach 15,000 points. This can take anywhere from a couple months to 5 years. Usually somewhere in between. I joined this gym when I was 6 months pregnant with my 4th and final spawn; I have no idea why, because no matter how often I...walked slowly on the treadmill, slowly as to keep any contractions to a minimum, (this WAS a fourth baby, you will recall) I only continued to increase in size. Of course, eating 4x more than the baby needs will do this to you; the baby will not get fat from it, but the mother will. They don't tell you this in pregnancy nutrition class. Okay, maybe they do, but I was too busy planning what I was going to eat within the next 30 minutes to ever pay attention to such things as pregnancy nutrition, at least not past the part where I started to feel convicted. That usually took all of about 5 seconds of scanning any manual, "What to eat while you're expecting" and all of that. I did remember the big things, though, like take your prenatal vitamins every day, and FOLIC ACID FOLIC ACID FOLIC ACID. Got that. And then I still had room for all the other stuff, too. Like warm brownies.

So there I was, increasing in stature and wisdom every day, just like the child version of Christ. Well, the stature part, anyway. The wisdom part, well, here's the truth, peeps. Come close. Snuggle up good and tight to the screen; it's okay, we're all friends here. I knew the whole time that whatever I ate during this pregnancy would come back to bite me later. And bite it did. Bit me right on the hiney...and the...arms, and the...thighs. Bit like a pit bull with a clenched jaw, and would not let go. Even the baby eventually gave up and decided that she had to get out of my body, had to let go and find somewhere else to breath and grow. But the weight, man, the weight was heartless, as I knew it would be. Let's not forget that this WAS a 4th pregnancy, so it's not like I didn't know that I wasn't one of those people who pop out a kid, and then, whala, 2 weeks later, she is back in her sassy skinny jeans. Just the thought of those people* made me bang my head against a wall repeatedly, at least in my head. But I digress. The baby was out, the weight was on, but there is something else that happened to me every time I had a baby. For as much as I didn't care how much I stuffed my face and lazed about during the baby growing in my belly phase, once the baby was out, I became this inside out version of who I was during pregnancy, which, being interpreted, means that I became a turbo force exercise queen, shunning sugar and white flour at all costs. Oh, I had to chow somewhat, I was breastfeeding the little darling after all, Which also helped the jumbo jaws of death to loosen their grip somewhat- but man, when you want to be in one place, and you are in another place...well, it's' easy to lose sight of how far you have come, that you actually HAVE come someplace. But you have. I have. I just wasn't always paying attention. You plug away and plug away at the thing, you chip, chisel, sweat, and you get up and do it again the next day. And then one day you wake up and you are there, instead of over there, when you used to be over there, but now you are here, and you are still moving forward, you can run 13.5 miles in the same amount of time you used to only be able to run 10. You have no idea how you got there. But there you are. Here I am.
I'm up to the 300,000 point t-shirt...It's pink with black letters. I'm going strong for the 400,000 point shirt; I think that one's silver or golden, or some such color that will wash me out or make me look jaundiced, that I will never ever wear. I never wear those t-shirts, but at least they show me where I am.

Slowly, I am getting faster.

-XOXO,

*When I was almost 9 months pregnant with precious darling #2, I asked my skinny friend Rennise to tell me what she had done to lose the baby weight, and how long it took her to lose it. She just very peacefully said "you know, it's funny, I had the second baby, and after 2 weeks, all the weight I had gained was just...gone." Um, yeah. In my postnatal dreams.