Why was 6 afraid of 7?

Sunday: No running, no walking — only the repetitive going up and down three flights of stairs at a house in Orlando full of friends. I have no excuse for breaking the 100 days so early except for my awkward and weird emotional state and my paralyzing fear of failure. I realize that my fear of failure actually led to, what I still believe to be, failure. Not complete failure. Just a bit of failure that could have been avoided.

Monday: No running, no walking — only the repetitive going up and down three flights of stairs at a house in Orlando full of friends. This day, there is a bit of an excuse. I had class in the morning, then I went home to O-town to visit my baby sister who just got her tonsils and adenoids taken out. I brought her ice cream from McDonald’s, which pretty much emptied my bank account. Have I ever mentioned I’m terrible with finances? I digress. I went home to visit her, and retrieve my camera — I need it to take photos of a baby & parents here in Kissimmee. Anyways — then I went to Orlando (to that great house full of friends) to celebrate CHRISTMAS for JESSICA because she is doing the 80 Days GCEX Challenge and she will be in SRI LANKA on December 25th. It was a great evening. And, due to a mix-up about who was driving who, I didn’t get home until after midnight, which is already breaking curfew, and the gym is only open until 11pm anyways.

So, really, I have no excuse for anything.

Today? Today, though? Day nine, now, is it?

I walked for an hour. Briskly walked for an hour, to be real. At least, it felt like briskly. I set out starting to do the running I was supposed to (it switched to 90 seconds running, two minutes walking for this week), but my right knee felt like it was about to cave beneath me, and my shins were not having it.

 

I want to run. Not being able to run like I want to is actually really not that fun at all — I hate it. I want so badly to do the assigned running for the assigned time. I want so badly to be a pro at running and walking for these thirty measly minutes.

 

Dream big, but allow yourself the opportunity to start small, and have your share of struggles in the beginning. The world’s great composers weren’t writing symphonies the day they first sat at a piano.

Kevin O’Rourke, Marathoner

 

Someone shared that quote with me. That was probably the highlight of my morning, because those are the sorts of things I need to hear and need to be reminded of. Struggles. Baby steps. Halves of baby steps.

I realized tonight on my drive home from Lydia’s that my pride, though not flamboyant (perhaps not the most appropriate word), is a major issue. My pride masks itself as kindness, as not wanting to be a burden, as humility. But more often, my pride is only masked to me, and the rest of the world can spot it from a mile away.

I don’t know where I want to go from here, as far as writing goes, so I’m just going to leave it at that. Goodnight.