Okay so this title was totally clickbait, so if you’re actually looking for a diet/exercise plan, you can try pinterest or something. BUT READ THIS FIRST.
In my last week or so of the race, I tried really hard to prepare myself for what was coming. But the truth is, it was really hard to anticipate how I would feel being back in the states, in my hometown. Now I’ve been back for about two weeks, and I still don’t really know how to anticipate what I’ll feel in any given moment. Sometimes I get through a stressful day at work and it’s fine, and some days I stand in the frozen section at Harris Teeter for a really long time and eventually burst into tears when a poor, unsuspecting stranger asks me if I’m okay.
So today I went for a run, a four mile trail run mind you, and about 10 minutes in tears started pouring, and I had NO IDEA why. I thought back over the past couple weeks and realized that every time I had exercised since being back I had burst into tears either during or directly after being done. At first I thought I was just frustrated, or that it was bringing up sensory triggers, or maybe I was holding stress in my body and it was being released. I didn’t know, but as I sat down in the middle of a trail in the middle of the woods and uncontrollably sobbed I realized maybe I needed to process some stuff, so I did.
Here’s the part where I get the realization.
The hardest part of transition for me has been coping with the fact that everyone else’s lives continued moving while I effectively hit “pause” for a year. It’s been hitting me in little moments, nothing too big or overwhelming, but it adds up. And the more that I thought about that, the more I realized that exercising was basically a metaphor for how I was coping, I felt behind. I compare myself with how I was before I left. I was strong, really strong, and now I felt weak and like everyone else was so far ahead of me because they had continued where I had “stopped”.
It made me really angry. I started praying while I ran (it burns extra calories you know), telling God that I was so mad that I had let myself fall back, that I wished I was as strong as I had been when I left. I even prayed that He would give me my “hardness” back because I was sick of being so emotional.
I started to think of what my old teammates would say if I said any of this out loud to them. “Look at all the ways you’ve grown instead! Look how strong you are in other ways!” all great things, but not what I wanted to hear. In that moment all I could say was “I want it back! I want what I had before I left!”
Then I felt God come up in my face (literally stopped me in my tracks) and say “Do you want your shame back? Your anxiety? You want to carry your fears again? How about the weight of the lies you’ve believed about yourself, want that back? Want the old chains that weighed you down? Want the insecurity? How about the worthlessness?”
In that moment I realized, yeah, I lost some stuff about myself that I cared about this year. I lost some of my strength, endurance, hardness. But I also lost a lot of weight. Weight that had kept me from acting for so many years, the weight of the burdens I am not created to carry. I dropped them, one by one, and handed then over to the One who already took them all on the cross with Him.
Oof. It’s so hard for me to hand my crap over to someone else. I keep picking them back up and shouldering through, instead of just leaving them behind and running free. It’s hard to run with a backpack of rocks. So lose em.
