I don't understand how running works with my body. Or I should say I don't understand it yet. But I'm learning. There are patterns I'm noticing - things that work and things that don't. For instance, earlier this month, I was running a few times a week. After couple weeks, each run was killing me. I had no energy or stamina, I got cramps and stitches in my side after the first half mile, and I actually gained a couple of pounds. Gross. Then it got cold and grey and wet, which I took for a perfect excuse to stop exercising.

Today I went out again for the first time in a while, and it was great. I did my longer, 4-mile loop (the other times I was going about 2.5) and it was good. Nothing cramped, nothing stitched, I have a few almost-blisters and I don't smell great right now, but I'm willing to take all of that in stride.

I think the big thing that changed (I mentioned patterns before - this is what I meant) is what I ate beforehand. Today I had a bottle of Blue Moon, Meijer sushi (readers in South Carolina need to bit their tongues. It's not that bad, ok?), and a mountain of chocolate chips, while before I was eating healthier but heavier things like pasta and drinking lots of water. This latest combination of victuals was magical - the sushi was light enough not to gum up my intestines, and the chocolate gave me enough sugar-energy to make it more than half way around the lake before I needed to stop and walk a spell. This menu might have to be a regular pre-run thing.

Also, I've decided that I'm a compulsive exerciser as much as I'm a compulsive eater (but neither of these things to an extreme degree, don't worry). When I got home from work today, I had no intention of going running, but once my "after school snack" turned into a feast, my guilty conscience chided me into a few miles of cardio. Maybe I'll wait a week and then go again? Tomorrow Danny and I are garage saleing, but before that there will be cream puffs and long johns, which might at least be incentive for a few jumping jacks or a sit-up. Or maybe we'll just power walk through Heritage Hill and I'll tell my conscience to deal with it. Because that usually works (?)

It's May and I'm tired. I've been trying to diagnose why (or of what) I am tired. I think the reason simply is that it is May and May is awfully far away from September. This school year has not been bad, but it has been full. So there's that.

Robert Frost wrote a poem called Neither Out Far Nor In Deep about people watching and watching the horizon, even though they know they won't be able to see anything that they can reach or understand, which can either be read as uplifting or bitter, depending on the mood you're in when you read it. We all already know how much I like Robert Frost, so I don't need to expound on how deliciously (excruciating-ly?) apt is the duality of this analogy for things and life and the effect of May on a young teacher approaching the end of her second year.

Today I just...left. After more than an hour, I stood up from half a pile of tests still waiting to be graded and walked out. I needed to be gone from there. Usually when I get impulses like that I'm able to quell them pretty quickly. I get that there is this discrete (yet never ending, like the post office, like everybody's job) amount of work that I am responsible for finishing, and just because I abandon it today does not mean it won't be there tomorrow morning; this is usually why I stay after school until I'm done, or at least until I reach a nice, neat stopping point. But today for some reason I just didn't want to. And when I got home I didn't feel any better.

But now I've posted for the first time in more than a month, so that helps a little. It's something, at least (for once, then, something...)

Update from The Future (Two Hours Later): I figured out the real reason for the tiredness. I had a caramel apple today at school (It's teacher appreciation week and our PTA has chosen 'Carnival' as the theme of their daily treats for us) and, after spiking in the middle of sixth hour, my blood-sugar proceeded to bottom out right in the middle of my grading session and maintained its dangerously low level all the way through the end of my original post. Nice how I get so emotional about it and immediately assume I'm spiraling into terminal lethargy, hm?

Anyway, because being enigmatic and obtuse isn't cool, here's what I'm (that is, I was...why is there no contraction for 'I was'?) talking about:

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull

he land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

And

Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something

.