Mind Games

In five weeks, I will be limping around a little, my legs burning with that familiar discomfort signaling that I pushed them a little further than they wanted to take me.

In five weeks, I will eat my favorite, calorie-laden Mexican dinner, trying my hardest to save room for ice cream, without guilt.

In five weeks, I will have crossed the finish line of my fourth half-marathon.

My legs have carried my body thirteen point one miles three other times, and each race has been uniquely challenging.

My mantra for each race has been “trust your training,” knowing that I had put in the training mileage, readied my body, no matter how painful it may have seemed during some of my runs.

Twinges in my left knee annoyed me while training for my first, later becoming painful enough to rely on a knee brace.

“Trust your training.”

I had to slow to a walk a few times, stretching my painful knee on the side of road and using the encouraging words of other runners to keep running, but my training carried me over the finish line.

My second was nine months after having Dylan.  Training runs meant rushing from the house after nursing, rushing back home, training myself to mother two children while coaxing my body back from pregnancy.

“Trust your training.”

I remembered that the underground tunnel connecting Windsor and Detroit would require a particularly motivating tune, so Kid Rock welcomed me back to Detroit with “Bawitaba”.  My training powered me through the last hill, somehow keeping the foot cramps from stopping the familiar left, right, left of my legs.

This winter drove me onto the treadmill, out of the cold and snow that freeze my motivation.

“Trust your training.”

I ran my best time of the three races.

Leaving that race, optimistic new goals bubbled into my consciousness.  My secret mental chalkboard blazed a new number.  I added a little speed work to my training plan.

Then I faltered.

Writing projects and active children compete with running on my priority list.

I missed some speed work, which doesn’t worry me.  I missed some long runs, which does.  My ambitious goal time is fading, slipping from my grasp.

There is still time to train, a few more long runs to spark my legs into remembering what I expect them to do when I lace up my shoes that morning to watch the sun rise over the Ambassador Bridge, concentrating on my pounding feet so that I don’t look down the impossible distance to the water.

I have vocally declared running a mental sport, explaining how my stubbornness helps me overcome my lack of natural ease in running.  Yet, trusting in my training means depending on my physical preparation.

“Trust your training” loses its power when I've fumbled in my training.

This time, I have a new mantra.

“Trust yourself.”

This is our very last week to make an impact for Be Enough Me 4 Cancer. Last week we had 45 people link up an enough-themed post in our Be Enough Me for Cancer campaign and I’d love it if you’d help us boost that number again. For every 20 linked up posts, Bellflower Books will provide a memory book to a woman fighting breast cancer through Crickett’s Answer for Cancer, and help bring a smile to courageous women giving it their all, every single day. The link-up remains open for three days. No blog? No worries. You can also comment on the post or on the Just.Be.Enough. Facebook page with your own story and be counted.


Even with the Be Enough Me 4 Cancer campaign drawing to a close, please continue to share your Be Enough Me stories on Mondays at Just Be Enough!  We will still be linking up every Monday and would still love to hear how YOU lived the Be Enough Me feeling each week.  Be part of carrying the weight of confidence, empowerment and share our mission to empower, inspire, and remind women, parents and children that the time has come to celebrate ourselves!

Does Tu Plus Tu Equal Trouble?

Music coaxes them off the couch, smiles pulled from furrowed brows.

“Dance!” Dylan exclaims, making Abbey laugh with his now infamous “squat move”, deep knee bends with an ear-to-ear grin on his face.

Abbey’s movements are more erratic, soft and fluid one moment, frantic and silly the next.

“That’s a pirouette, Mommy,” she informs me, spinning on one leg, unbalanced and giggling, her pronunciation slightly more impressive than her technique.

Our dance parties spontaneously add life to our days, rainy mornings when we’re stuck in pajamas for too long, afternoons when Dylan’s nap crowds into the slight space between rest and the craziness of dinnertime.

We dance with abandon, spinning and shimmying and falling in laughter.

“I learned that at dance, Mommy,” Abbey confides every once in a while, and my heart sighs in happiness that she enjoys her classes, that she looks forward to them, that she walks into the dance studio comfortably and with only a slight hint of shyness.

Later, I settle down to watch a train wreck of a reality show I should be ashamed to admit watching. 

Dance Moms might be the first reality show that has actually induced nausea as I watched, and I watched the entire first season of Jersey Shore. 

Something about the combination of the overbearing dance teacher, the competitive moms, the little girls in full make-up and earrings at their dance classes, not competitions or performances,brings tears to my eyes.

And while I realize this show is an exaggerated version of some crazy reality designed to invoke strong reactions, a sliver of doubt pushes into my consciousness.

I loved my dance classes as a child and teenager, but despite dancing at a non-competitive studio, there were jealousies and body image issues, hurt feelings and worries of inadequacy.

I can remember fervently wishing I could reverse my body’s earlier-than-average development, uncomfortable in a body that wasn’t the sleek and lithe ideal of my dance teacher.

Thinking of Abbey ever feeling that way makes me cringe in pain.

But she expressed an interest in dance, and I thought it would be a perfect activity for her to ease into socializing with other kids without me present. 

At dance, she can work alongside other students, quietly getting comfortable with the other girls.  She can smile shyly and link hands and dance around the room without saying more than a word or two.

She always asks to go to class and always reiterates how much fun she has with her beloved teacher and her friends.

For now, I will choose to turn off Dance Moms.

I will focus on this season’s dancers on So You Think You Can Dance, young women with powerful legs and unbelievable extension and the ability to transform music into something tangible and magical.

I will focus on my own positive memories of my first pointe shoes and going to dance camp on a college campus and the way I still remember little bits and pieces of music and body positions and the feeling of a swirling skirt on stage.

I will focus on our afternoon dance parties, when music twists impatience into laughter.

For now, we will dance.

dance moves 

my first dance recital

I'm on the far right

the girl on the far left?

that's my roommate, both at dance camp and our freshman year of college

we never went to school together and wouldn't have met without dance

and I never would have traded her friendship, not even for slower developing breasts