The day I met Laini Taylor!

One of my favorite young adult series to recommend to older teens at the library is Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy. Actually, forget recommending it...it's one of my favorite young adult series! I like it because it's a different sort of fantasy. It doesn't really follow many tropes, even though it uses some common-ish fantasy types: chimera and angels. It starts in Prague (a city I would love to visit, partly because of these books) and then it goes everywhere. There is a solid, healthy friendship that doesn't get abandoned when romance shows up and romance that feels authentic and deliciously sensuous.

Plus the end didn't disappoint me.

Yep, definitely some of my favorite young adult novels.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I discovered there is a companion novel, called Night of Cake & Puppets. In the trilogy, the main character is Karou; her best friend is Zuzana and while Karou is off figuring out some mysterious goings-on, Zuzana is trying to get the attention of her long-held crush, Mik (aka "violin boy"). As they are secondary characters in the trilogy (but really come alive in the third book especially), we don't get to see how Zuzana accomplishes this, but that is what the companion novel is about: Mik and Zuzana's first date.

I loved this book for many reasons. One was being re-invited into the world Taylor created in her series, and the chance to see Karou from an outside perspective. One was how it describes Prague, which I now want to visit even more badly. One is just the story itself, the self-doubt and misunderstandings and thrillingness of new romance. Plus: there are illustrations! I'm not much of a graphic-novel reader, and this isn't a full-blown graphic novel at all. Instead, there are just a smattering of drawn illustrations taken from Zuzana's art sketchbook (but actually drawn by Taylor's husband). Finally, I enjoy Taylor's writing style, which is casually snarky in the best way.

This is a quick read, just a couple of hours (if everyone would leave you alone for a couple of hours, that is). And it fits into The Daughter of Smoke and Bone​ trilogy pretty seamlessly; you could read it as a prequel or after the last book or anywhere along the story line. It also stands alone just fine if you don't want to read the trilogy. (But who wouldn't want to read it?) I'm glad I accidentally stumbled upon it one day on the sorting cart by the fiction desk. 

Today is my 46^th birthday. 

I definitely don’t love many things about being in my 40s. My uncooperative left eyebrow, for example, which wants to slouch down lower than my right, so I’m always using my forehead muscles to try to pull it up and sometimes this gives me a headache. The fact that I am starting to develop crepey skin over my knees. My fingernails are brittle and break easily. My eyesight is starting to get wonky. I actually, literally do feel bad about my neck. My hair is grey and fragile and thin. I don’t remember what it feels like to not be tired, I’ve struggled with depression more than I have since I was 17, and the weight!

Don’t even get me started on being a 45 46-year-old woman with thyroid and adrenal issues and trying to lose weight.

There are definitely a lot of things I don’t love about this decade.

But they are all related to my body. And while I feel a deep sense of irrational shame over my body experiencing the aging process, I also logically know I can’t do a whole lot to influence it. I can exercise, and eat as healthy as I can, and use the techniques I’ve learned to not let my corticoid steroid levels gallop away. Moisturizer and creams and careful use of make-up. But I also think that, to a certain extent, I’m mostly not in control over aging.

And I do, actually, despite all of these on-the-downslope-of-life issues, enjoy being in my forties.

This is because I feel so much more in control of my emotional issues.

Well, maybe “control” isn’t exactly the right word.

I feel like every year I get older, I am learning what truly requires my emotional energy, and what does not. I am learning that it is OK to grieve for losses and that the difference between expectation and reality is a loss to grieve. I am learning to sit fully within my joy. I am seeing how the experiences I had at 18 and 22 and 29 and 36 prepared me for what I am experiencing right now, and so I am more patient in whatever struggle I am currently experiencing, as I feel able to look forward and know it will help me in some way in the future. I am learning to fully embrace who I am, instead of the person even very beloved people think I am or want me to be. I am getting better at setting boundaries. I am so willing to say “that is bullshit” and then to walk away from the BS.

This wisdom is not without pain; it is, in fact, gathered mostly from painful experiences. But I feel less inclined to kick in protest or to feel sorry for myself or to think I am beleaguered by God’s disappointment. Difficult things happen; terrifying, painful, devastating. Not just to me but to everyone, and being resentful about them makes them more difficult. So I am trying to continue to look for wisdom.

My life on the higher side of my 40s is not what I imagined it to be two decades ago. I thought I would have what my mother and older sisters had at my age: all of my family close to me, grandkids and family parties and using all of the plates at Christmas. I’ve projected my future grandmotherly self for many years, ever since Kaleb was no longer a baby and I realized that yes, he really would be my last. I have looked forward to being a grandmother since then (actually, since I was young and I loved spending time with my grandma, and she would say "one day you'll be a grandma; will you tell your grandkids about me?"), and I assumed it would just…happen. But that is part of the knowledge I am gaining: what it really is like for your children to grow up and leave home. They become who they are in reality, not who you imagined they might be, and that is incredibly amazing. I don’t have grandchildren or in-laws yet, but I do have my amazing adult children who are finding their way in the world, and my sweet Kaleb still at home. I still have my marriage. I have my sisters and my friends. I can still run, hike, garden, make things.

And there is a goodness in being here, right now. It is absolutely OK that my kids haven’t gotten married or had kids yet. Or ever. They get to choose; if I am ever a grandmother I will, of course, be thrilled. But if I am not, that is also OK. Because another thing I am learning is that on this side of my life, when there are fewer people who need me, there is a sense of freedom. I can do whatever: travel, change careers, go back to school. Finally become a real writer. I can discover the person I’ve been becoming during the past two decades of motherhood. I am different than I was when I started this journey, but I am also the same. Wiser, but only wise enough to know there is a whole (well, a half, I suppose) lifetime of wisdom to accumulate.

I love that I was born in the spring. I’ve always loved it; when I was younger it was because the four-month-long gift drought was over, and presents for an April birthday are delightful when you’re a girl: new sandals and spinney dresses and sunglasses and fresh make-up palettes. Now, I love it because it allows me to start again as the world starts again; to look for the new ways I can blossom.

Today is the 18^th, which means it’s time for another edition of 18 on the 18^th. Hi Angie! Hi Elizabeth!

I’ve decided to not view my failure to manage to take 18 pictures as, indeed, a failure. Instead, I will just celebrate the photos I did take, while just using words to describe 18 things about today.

1. Kendell had an appointment with his orthopedic surgeon this morning. This morning at 7:30. At 7:30 in Salt Lake City. I so did not want to haul my butt out of bed at 6:15. Let’s be honest: I don’t want to haul my butt out of bed when I have to get up almost an hour later. I’ve never been a morning person but lately the act of getting out of bed feels physically painful. I can’t tell you exactly where it hurts, but somewhere.
2. The surgeon thinks Kendell’s knee (he had a partial knee replacement in February) is coming along just fine. He told him to stop being vain about his scar (he’s sort of a blunt guy, that orthopedist) and to keep it covered with sunscreen all summer, which to me seems like sort of a contradiction: don’t worry so much about your scar but make sure you protect your scar. At any rate, because he can’t take anti-inflammatories, as they mix badly with blood thinners, the surgeon suggested a round of prednisone instead.
3. This sent me into a little panic. I took prednisone for two weeks when I was 14 or 15 for a lung infection and HOLY COW. It made me a moody, emotional mess. Part of me thinks I have never been the same since those 14 days of steroids. I really, really hope they don’t affect Kendell’s emotional state like they affected mine. (Of course…adolescence might’ve made my reaction worse.) To calm myself down I made a plan for if it DOES make him a little bit crazy (or a lot crazy): One of us will just stay in a hotel until it’s over. Totally doable.
4. I had Kendell drop me off on a side street just off the freeway so I could run home. Being dropped off after an errand=one of my favorite ways to fit in a run, because I love having somewhere different to start.
5. I did my long run today. My plan is to do all of my long runs on Mondays but, alas, I haven’t actually done a long run on Monday. Last week I was writhing with anxiety-induced neck pain. This week there were 40+ MPH winds and I was afraid that a branch of a tree might blow off and hit me. So I went to the gym and did 3.5 miles on the treadmill. Which might be worse than being hit by a wind-blown tree branch.
6. Anyway, today’s long run was seven miles. The first three miles were basically all uphill, which sounds like torture but I actually really love running uphill. Even though it makes me slower. I haven’t run long since I did my half marathon in New York City in November, and I’m always unsure as I start building miles: Am I strong enough to keep going? And I’m finding that I am, at least so far. I was tired, but not unbearably so. Plus, running in the spring is glorious. Right now there are forsythia bushes, tulips, daffodils, and grape hyacinths, flowering crab apple trees, and entire peach orchards in bloom. So pretty. And there’s the smallest hint of a floral scent here and there. So lovely.
7. I was afraid I dressed too warmly for my run, as my phone told me it would only be 36 degrees when I started but it was actually 41. And I had a wool long sleeve on, and long tights. But that’s the cool thing with wool, it regulates your temperature. Even when I was finished at it was almost 50 degrees, I was just…comfortable.
8. Stretching after running=the best thing ever. Maybe better than running itself. Especially when I can stretch outside. This morning I stretched underneath my apple tree, which is almost ready to blossom. My neighbor came over to say hello and show me some pics from a recent trip. A protein shake after a long run is pretty damn good too.
9. While I drank my protein shake, I hurried to finish the quilt backing for my soccer quilt. I was going to quilt it by myself…but I think some of that neck pain might also be coming from my recent spate of making quilts. It’s been a furious spate. A ridiculous spate. Four quilts almost finished. Plus, I just really, really love the way a long-arm quilted quilt looks. So, see #12.
10. Then I hurried to shower so I could speed (literally) to the next place I needed to be: I finally got my hair done. AH! I wish my hair could always be the same color it is on hair-color day. I really, really am not accepting my grey roots gracefully.
11. It was lovely to talk to my hair person. I’ve known her for ages, and even funnier: my high school friend had the biggest crush on my hair person’s husband, back when she and I were 17 and he worked at the cologne counter at ZCMI. Then a couple of years later, he started working at WordPerfect, where I was working but not, alas, my friend who had the crush. He and I became good friends though. And then he got married (not to my high school friend) and I started having his wife do my hair. There was about a decade where I tried going to other people, because she lives about twenty minutes away. But no one has done my hair as well as she does.
12. With freshly-colored hair, I stopped at the house of the person who quilts my quilts for me, Melissa of Sew Shabby quilting. She forgave me for running late. I dropped off the soccer quilt and can’t wait to see it finished. (Please overlook that by the time I actually finish the soccer quilt, soccer might be over. Or at least it won’t be freezing during games anymore. Then I will just call this the purple quilt.)
13. Next, I went to the Close to my Heart warehouse sale and bought a few things. Stamps, cardstock, a few inkpads. I also bought THREE pink post-bound albums. Haley doesn’t love pink but I will probably use them anyway. Because, you know. They were only $4 (I think the albums are $30 now. You do the math.)
14. I rushed home, changed for work, realized I forgot to take Kaleb’s track uniform to him. Nathan was just getting home from school so I had him drive me to the junior high to drop it off. On the way home we talked about a meme I found recently, “signs you’re actually a cat,” and we talked about why Kendell is, actually, a cat. Even though he dislikes cats. I took this photo of me and Nathan just so I could remember laughing in his car in the driveway with him. (And also, I confess, to commemorate Freshly-Colored Hair Day, as it is such a short, fleeting day.)
15. I didn’t have time but I decided to make time: I wandered around in my yard for a few minutes. April, too, is fleeting, and I haven’t taken enough time to savor my beautiful
    spring flowers. (Well, and, truth be told: Mother Nature has been pretty grumpy this spring. Not that I blame her, as we’re all in a fairly abusive relationship with her, but there have been almost no warm days so far this spring.)
16. I was starving. So before work I stopped at that bastion of healthy eating, Taco Bell. I know. But I needed some actual food in my body. Nothing fried was purchased.
17. Off to work. Yes: I was late. Yes: I ate tacos in my office while I filled book group requests. Yes: I savored the silence. Later that night I filled the new book display, which was looking pretty empty. Carrying large, wobbly stacks of books in both arms up a flight of stairs=special librarian skill. 
    
    
18. Finally home late. I am tired. Today was a long day and I didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to. (Kaleb’s uniform? The only thing I actually dried in the load of laundry I started before we left for the doctor this morning. Everything else is sitting in a cold, wet pile I will have to rewash.) (I also didn’t make a card for a birthday that’s tomorrow. So maybe I will just make and mail it tomorrow.) (And I’m only going to get in about ten minutes of reading before I fall asleep.) Some days are just like that, long and full. But I do feel like I got a lot accomplished, too.

How was your April 18^th? I hope it was full of orange tulips and bright green grass!

They mostly aren’t yellow: they’re white, with blue accents and yellow soles.
But since I bought them on clearance at Dick’s two years ago, I’ve thought of them as my yellow running shoes. That was also their designation in my Map My Run account: yellow Brooks GTS 15.

I’m pretty careful about rotating my running shoes, so at any given time I have at least two, and sometimes four, pairs I run in. I think this helps your shoes to last longer, and plus, it’s sort of fun to have more than one color to choose from. I got the yellow ones for a great price, the same day I bought my GTS 16s (my aqua shoes) which I think were marked $20 off accidentally, but whatever. Because they automatically felt older, as they were the previous year’s model, I also wore the yellow running shoes for other things.

I wore them when Kaleb and I went to Cedar Point amusement park to celebrate his eleventh birthday.

(It was just the two of us so all I have is selfies…you’ll have to take my word that my yellow shoes are on my feet!)

And, on that same trip, I wore them to run four beautiful miles at Niagara Falls.
(I hadn’t yet perfected—or even attempted very often—the running selfie so, alas: no running photos of my Niagara Falls run.)

I wore them on three trips to Lagoon (another amusement park) with my family.

I wore them on walks with Kendell in the canyon, during which we’d talk about a million different subjects. Sometimes we figured things out, sometimes we didn’t, but it was always good to spend time together, walking.

I took them to Hawaii with me, so all of my runs on the island were in them. (Is it weird that I want to go back to Hawaii partly because I want to run there more?)

And the hiking we did in Volcanoes National Park.

I took them to California with me last summer, where I ran on a beautiful trail right on the beach.

I wore them for 567 miles of running. Snowy runs, rainy runs, many, many hot Utah runs.

My yellow shoes have been great companions for many adventures. But the tell-tale sign has started popping up: I can’t run in them anymore, because when I do they give me bunion blisters. Yesterday, after my first long run in my training for the San Francisco marathon, I pulled them off when I got home and discovered two enormous bloody blisters, and I had to admit defeat:

It was the last run of my yellow shoes.

I think it was a good run to end on. A little bit more than six miles on the Provo River Trail. For the first five miles, I had the trail completely to myself. Just me and the cold wind in the still-naked trees, the quick splashing of the river next to me, the bright sun. When I was almost at two miles, I came around a curve in the trail to a shady spot; a rabbit was racing across the trail into the bushes next to it, followed by some kind of hawk. The hawk dove into the bushes but came up empty, its breakfast escaped. Then, as if it were mad at me for interrupting its hunt, it swooped down close to my head. So close I could hear its wings and see the mottled markings on its tail feathers when it flew away. I didn’t even panic, but just felt like a part of nature for a moment.

(I know this is kind of goofy...but I love this sort of running selfie. Me running right out of the frame. It captures the action!)

I run on the river trail quite often, but it’s so well-loved by our community that there aren’t many chances for wildlife encounters. So to experience that little bit of nature, red in tooth and claw, felt like a blessing. A benediction on my well-loved yellow running shoes, which will now be constricted to finish out their days of usefulness as gardening shoes.

My next pair of new running shoes, which I bought on a Black Friday blowout in November, are pink. PINK! Sad as I am to retire my yellow shoes, I’m excited to start running in pink shoes. What unknown-as-yet adventures will they take me on?

Sometimes I write poems about my children, but not so often as I did when they were little. When they were little and everything was miraculous and painfully good, when their precociousness was a sign, when I didn't know yet how, despite my intentions, I would make mistake after mistake. When I didn't think I would make mistakes: that was when I could write poems about my children.

The last one I wrote, or at least tried to write but never finished, I wrote in the car as we drove home from California. Not a car—a minivan, the first one we owned, the white one with the door that sometimes wouldn't open properly because someone spilled lemonade in the cup holder during our first family-of-six trip to California. This poem I wrote driving home after we'd stopped for the morning at Newport Beach, and I was trying to translate why the experience was painful by writing a poem about it, and it was so big—not just the beach and the ocean but the way my daughter walked across the beach toward the ocean like she was walking away from me.

Maybe you can only write poems about your children when they are young because when they are young the experiences are more universal; everyone's child is wise beyond her years or sometimes he says something so profound your adult brain is confused and shattered. Doesn't that happen to everyone? And when they are younger, writing poems about your children is the same thing as writing poems about being a mother. But when they get older, the experiences are more personal and entirely unique to the space between you and your child. And when they get older, what you understand about being a mother gets harder and harder to say. Even in poems. Or maybe especially in poems.

Or maybe I am not a good enough poet (as if I can even call myself a "poet") to write poems about my children.

I thought about those poems I wrote about my children while I read Maggie Smith's poetry book, Good Bones. I discovered her work via her poem "Good Bones,"  (and, please: click on that link and read the poem, even if you think you don't like poems, or especially if you think you don't) which grew popular in late 2016, what with all the shootings (Pulse nightclub, Jo Cox) and, you know, the United States electing an enormous, petulant, orange-faced toddler as the leader of the civilized world. Someone posted a snip of it somewhere, Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, and eventually a few famous people noticed it, and then everyone had read it.  (That article says that the most popular post-election poem was "September 1, 1939" but what I kept repeating to myself, over and over even though I didn't, at first, remember that I had memorized it, was "The Second Coming" by Yeats: "what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?")

Not all of the poems in Good Bones are about her children, but many of them are. The poet Erin Belieu says that Smith's poems help her "discover with real surprise now frequently exhausted human touchstones." Writing about your children=a touchstone of poetry, but I agree with Belieu's assessment: the poems about children feel fresh, not exhausted. I read a library copy and before I returned it the book was bristling with post-its and bits of cardstock and a few torn-apart Bath & Bodyworks coupons that I'd used to mark poems I want to read again.
Basically I want to read the whole book again.

I'd like to trace the way the girl in the book interacts with the hawk and the hawk's shadow (which she wears "like an overlay of feathers printed on her skin"). I'd like to underline and comment.

I'll have to buy my own copy obviously. Some books are like that: they own you as you start to read them and then a library copy, a one-time experience, is never enough, and Good Bones is that kind of book for me.

I think my favorite poem in the book is "First Fall,"  which is about a woman walking through a park with her infant, who is experiencing fall for the first time. "Fall is when the only things you know/because I've named them begin to end." It made me think of how, when Kaleb was a baby, I would walk around everywhere—the house, the yard, our neighborhood, the mall, public parks—holding him and naming things, because he was my only fussy baby, the only baby who cried for no reason I ever figured out, but the holding and the walking and the language, the litany of nouns, helped him not to cry. Also this line: "I'm desperate for you/to love the world because I brought you here." True for all of my children, but especially Kaleb, who I worked the hardest to bring here.

Or maybe my favorite is "At Your Age I Wore a Darkness,"  but maybe that is too easy because I too wore a darkness, because I worried about giving my darkness to my children, and because now they are grown I know who I gave my darkness to. (I gave it but I still kept it.)

I loved so many of these poems. Maybe all of them. And while I love poetry, and I love reading poetry, I can't say that of all the poetry books I love. Many of them have poems I just don't understand, or don't like, or I think "Yes, OK, but I've read this before." I didn't have that reaction with these poems though.

I'm glad there are poets who can write good poems about children.

It took me almost a month to finish Tayari Jones's novel An American Marriage, but don't let that fact dissuade you from reading it. It didn't take me a long time to finish because it was
disappointing or bad in some way; instead, it was so good I couldn't read it for long. So good at relaying sadness and pain, I mean, and since I was immediately hooked to the characters, I didn't want them to feel what they had to feel and I also didn't want to vicariously feel what they would feel. 

Even though I wanted to know what happens.

An American Marriage is the story of Celestial and Roy, who are newlyweds living in Atlanta. They don't have a perfect marriage—has Roy already cheated? The reader can't really be sure, and the relationship between the couple and the two sets of in-laws is fraught—but it feels like a real one. But this American marriage isn't going to be challenged the way many are, not by cheating or money issues or infertility or anything else. Instead, Roy is put into prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Partly that is all I want to tell you about this novel: it's the story of what happens to a young marriage when such an unfair and difficult intrusion is thrust into it. Because I want you to read it, and I don't want to tell you what happens because I want you to experience it. Even if it's painful. Even if it takes you a month.

I loved this book.

For what it intuits about marriage, intimacy, history, family, race, the violence of American society. But also the structure (it's partly told in letters) and because Celestial was infuriating to me but I also understood her choices, and because sometimes I wanted to shake Roy and sometimes just hug him, and because nothing is fair. And because the tree on the cover will make sense.

Because when I did finally finish it, the last fifty pages all at once, it broke me right open and I wept. That good, painful crying that good books can bring you, when the characters' pain is, for a minute, yours except you know that, thank God, this isn't really your pain.

But at the same time, some of their pains are the same as mine, because I am married. And I am a human.

And that's all I'm going to say about An American Marriage. Except, this too: I hope you'll read it. And let me know if you loved it, too. Even if it's a painful story.

Kendell and I were joking yesterday about how, when we’re out hiking, I only have to run faster than him if we come across a hungry bear. This is a longstanding joke of ours, built upon our mutual knowledge of each other’s weaknesses, fears, and skills. Kendell pointed out that if we were in rocky terrain he’d still be able to outrun me on a sprint, given my history of spraining my ankle on flat ground. (All of this is done with laughter…maybe you have to be married for a long, long time to understand this joke?)

When we stopped laughing, I started thinking about how the cheetah is my spirit animal. This isn’t because our running styles are anything alike. Cheetahs are super-fast over short distances; I am fairly slow but I can go forever. More, it is the cheetah’s need for solitude and freedom that clicks with me. I had A Moment with a cheetah once at a zoo. The cat enclosures were being remodeled, so they were in temporary spots. On this day, the cheetah was in a fenced-in space enclosed with chain link fence, shaped like  a long, narrow rectangle, and she was pacing all along the fence, back and forth. I stopped and held perfectly still (there weren’t many people around at that moment or I’m certain this wouldn’t have happened), and eventually she stopped her pacing and looked me right in the eye. Her body language, those tear marking on her face, and just the look in her eye: I recognized that feeling. She wanted to run, without any fences or restrictions; she wanted to move her body in the strong, fast way it was made to move. (When you stop for even a second to think about it, zoos are really terrible places, aren’t they?)

(Not the cheetah in the little cage at the zoo...I didn't take a picture of her, because that moment—really, that cheetah—wasn't about photography. This is a photo of a cheetah at the San Diego Wild Animal Park that I took years before my Cheetah Moment.)

I understood what her body was saying. She must’ve looked right at me for at least 15 seconds, until a large crowd came up the walkway and she resumed her pacing. But in that moment, I didn’t just understand the cheetah; I felt like she (or maybe The Universe, or whatever) understood me, too.

I’ve never been caught in a cage. At least, not literally. But a lot of times in life, I feel caught. By expectations, by other people’s needs, by my responsibilities. By relationships that require work; by the difference between what I thought my life would be and the life I actually made. And when I feel that feeling, I need to move. Not like a cheetah, because that’s not how my body was made, but long and slow, outside, with the mountains I love behind or before me. That need to move freely: that is why the cheetah is my spirit animal. And it’s also one of the things that keeps me running, that makes me want to run until the day I die.

But I also need goals to keep me going.

(Just before I finished my marathon in 2011.)

The past few years, I haven’t run as many races as usual. Partly this is because the team I ran Ragnar with dissolved, so the goal that kept me training in the spring is gone. Partly it’s because of injuries: several ankle sprains and my double popliteus tear last summer. But I love running races, because it keeps my motivation for running high.

I’ve been talking about running a marathon this year since last fall. It feels appropriate to run 26.2 miles during the year that Kendell and I are celebrating our 26^th wedding anniversary. And I’ve been wanting to run the San Francisco marathon for a couple of years, ever since some random Googling brought it to my attention. You get to run over the Golden Gate Bridge AND through the park AND around the city. I’ve never run a large city race like this one—the half marathon I did last fall in New York was in its inaugural year and had something like 600 runners—but I’ve wanted to. And a race in the summer in California means a trip to California in the summer. And all of those hills! (I love running hills.)

So yesterday, after having a serious talk with Kendell about what we need to accomplish this summer, what the kids’ schedules are, and if he even wanted to visit San Francisco, I decided yes on the marathon, and I signed up.

And now I’m a little bit freaked out.

What if I get injured again?

What if my lingering capsulitis flares up and becomes unmanageable?

What if something else comes up with Kendell’s heart?

What if I haven’t given myself enough time to train?

What if I’m too old for marathons?

What if I’m just not strong enough?

This morning I am plotting out my training plan. Not just so I have a training plan, but so I can calm my nerves. And I’m thinking about the cheetah—about not being caged. About how cool it will be to run across the bridge, to run through the park, to go up and down those hills. I am trying to ask myself positive questions, too:

What if I lose a little bit of weight?

What if my body gets stronger?

What if I grow in confidence?

What if I do it, and finish—wouldn’t that feel amazing?

Deep breath. It’s time to start training!