A different kind of race

Well, another year, and another "survival" marathon completed.  I'm sure somewhere I said that I would never not train again, and if I did that I would just give up at that point.

I really gotta stop saying never.

But anyway, the one aspect of the race I'm going to use as a way to focus my mind as I attempt to not ramble is this: it was the HOTTEST race I've done.  Not just Disney marathon, but any race ever in the past nine years (granted I think the most races I've done in a year is three, I don't know the exact number, but still, I live in Florida and all but one race has been somewhere down here).  And it was warm when it started, around 70°F and 90% humidity, and only got worse over time.  I actually wasn't feeling all that bad until somewhere around 10 AM or so, which would have been over the halfway point.

And so, as I have done previously, I will make this race analogous to how the year went.

Training was actually going well for a little while.  I picked up running in July, and by the end of August, when I had moved into my new place, I was running 3 miles almost comfortably and had pushed myself to 4 once or twice.  And then I don't really know what happened, outside of the hurricane that never was, but it was around that time that the running completely dropped off.

Now, to be fair, this past fall was the craziest fall I've had from a schedule perspective.  But also there was something else diminishing my ability to flourish: the heat, the humidity, the anger.

The anger.

Anger.

I know that Kübler-Ross's model of grief is not meant to be in stages (as in once you get past denial, you evolve into anger!) and also that it was research done about people facing their own deaths and not necessarily the deaths of others.  But at the same time I can only speak to my experience, and as I alluded to around the last entry, I'm pretty sure I've been in denial for a while and am just starting to get past that, but also I have moved into anger slowly but surely.  And so, for my analytical mind, the proof:

I don't know that I have an entry that speaks directly to denial outside of this mention of a period of time where I would wake up and an internal voice would remind me that Cam died.  This entry was almost a year ago, and the absence of that voice probably happened sometime over the summer of 2018 if I had to make a guess.  But then you take entry after entry after entry about my own lamenting that I don't talk to people and maybe it's less "I don't know how to do this" and more subconsciously "if I start to do this more it becomes reality."

(Also my brain was maybe fully developed as all this happened?  Engaged at 24, her diagnosis at 25, widowed at 26?  Who let me do anything?)

And then the other side of this theory, that I'm only now really dealing with anger.  This writing is from the fall of 2018, and while it may have just been a fluke week. . . I know myself enough to know that when I write things of that nature, they are obvious.  I don't have an exact moment because see above, it's not black and white stages as much as I would like for it to be that way.  But definitely 2019 I found myself angry about many things, and while some bigger things may have had some legitimacy, nothing excuses a general anger about things like:
- knocking my air freshener off my car and then not being able to find it.  INFURIATING
- having to be responsible for a simple issue that requires literally one of the things I'm responsible for on the functional side of church.  HOW DARE YOU COMPLAIN
- Florida drivers.  OK, maybe I get a pass on this one

But I could make a list of a million little things, and I know that I am not that person.  I would be curious to talk with people that have spent time with me in the past 6-18 months and see if there is any insight.  I think the flip side of that is that I know well enough that those things are spiritual battles and whether fully confronting or out of habit, I would very likely not get to a point of being completely taken over by anger, no matter how tempting.  I think the incident that shows it the most was the apartment situation, and I did go further than I may have if I had realized that this is the current state of the grief rock.

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I feel like I've said a lot and said nothing at all.  But I am going to quote myself from an older entry:

I have forgotten that reentering life means reentering the spiritual battlefield.