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So, that whole 5K thing I have been talking about doing off and on throughout the life of this blog, and then publicly posted that I was planning to complete one?

I did it.

It wasn't the most amazing run ever (I completed it in 44:11, which is a 14:22 pace), but I learned a lot about racing and about my own strength. And in hindsight, I've seen just how strong I've become over the last six months, how far I've moved beyond the expectations I held for myself before I started running.

About 6 weeks before the race, Andy had a chance to observe me running. He ran cross-country in high school, and his input and support when I faced a new challenge had been one of the best things to keep me going when I wanted to give up or go back to easier intervals. He watched me struggle on a day when my muscles were simply not cooperating, and told me that my pace was more of a trot than a run and with a tiny bit more effort, I could see much better speeds. A true run was something I'd never done in my life, and my body refused to keep it up for more than a minute or two without dropping down to a walk. So I regrouped, started the C25K program all over again, and built myself up to running 8 minute intervals with 5 minute walking breaks, repeated long enough to finish five kilometers. I was nervous, but I eventually worked up (down?) to having a 5K training run completed in less than 44 minutes. With my former slow trot, it would have taken me about 50 minutes to complete, so that difference is astounding.

My sister had a medical emergency the day before my race, so I was a bit rattled going in. She's fine now, but my thoughts kept going back and forth between worry that something similar would happen to me and feeling like I needed to push myself for her sake, because a 5K isn't something she could be doing any time soon in her state.

Once the race started, I pushed too hard, trying to keep up with everyone around me. My original back-of-the-pack placement turned out to be more in the middle as people filed in behind me, and the effort to keep up made me grab a water bottle. Having never, ever had water in the middle of the run, I learned very quickly that it's a good way to get a side stitch. My usual intervals were completely blown, and gradually it devolved into running half-heartedly from time to time and a lot of walking. I was nearly in tears at one point because I was so sure that I had blown it, I couldn't possibly finish under my goal time of 45:00. But there were great cheerleaders (including Andy and Brianna, at several spots along the route), and at the end I was able to give it everything I had. I sprinted for the finish line, and as I cooled down, Andy told me my gun time was 45:08. Definitely well within 45:00 for my chip.

I took a break from running for most of November. We went on a CRUISE (it was so awesome!!!) a couple weeks after the race, and when we returned it was so much colder that my asthma flared up when I tried to run. I eased back into things and now I'm back to training to run 3 miles straight without walking breaks. My goal is to do a spring race with a 13:00 pace or better (which race I'll do is TBD). As of today, I've built up to 17 minutes straight at a 12:45 pace.

The progress I've made is sometimes hard to believe when I look back on what I've done. I often feel discouraged, that I'll never get to move beyond whatever I'm up against. But six months ago, I didn't think I could run for a minute even if I tried. Six months ago, I couldn't fit clothes outside of the plus-size section in a store. Six months ago, I thought I was doomed to an obese life, a world where I didn't have enough energy for all the things I wanted to experience and I couldn't really, truly be proud of every part of me. And now I know that's not true, not even a little bit.

But really this little girl is what I run for. So she always knows how strong her mama is and that she is strong too:

Because nothing says love like demanding to wear Mama's sweaty hoodie after a run.

No More Excuses

A couple months ago, I had one of those horrible, terrible, awful, no good, very bad days. Plans to go camping were thwarted by a severe storm that left the ground quite soggy, and I was in the kind of mood that takes a small disappointment and turns it into an opportunity to enumerate Everything That Sucks About Me. But at some point in the midst of despairing my body and the fact that I was well on my way to gaining back all the weight I had lost while nursing, I had an epiphany.

Nothing will change until I make big changes in my life.

For everyone else in the world who has found exercise and healthy eating to be a fact of life: SUCK IT. Between undiagnosed asthma and my devotion to food as coping mechanism, I had spent my life completely convinced that exercise would always be uncomfortable and crap-tastic, and that I was incapable of eating like a normal human being. Why bother, when life is clearly better when you're not getting sweaty and those pesky feelings of inadequacy can be stuffed with a giant gooey chocolate chip cookie?!

So I made a choice to try something, ANYTHING, because I couldn't bear the thought of feeling so unhappy with myself for the rest of my life. I had considered trying the Couch to 5K program in the past, but that voice in the back of my head held me back. "what if you can't do it? then you'll be fat AND a failure. and with that asthma? bad idea. better go get a snack instead." Sometimes I countered [what, you don't have conversations with yourself in your head?] that I could probably walk a 5K with some training, and maybe even run a bit of one too! And this time, the positive voice won.

I started training the very next day. Had a few stumbles. Figured out how to make it work and why carrying a smartphone in your pocket is not, in fact, a smart idea. And then really started to enjoy it. Sometimes unfamiliar phrases would just pop out, like "I bet I can push harder on this interval!" and "I wish it were my running day already..." and "I hope this foot injury doesn't keep me from running!" There were some setbacks along the way. Days that it felt like I would never get stronger, and always be that slow poke from middle school gym class that doesn't finish her mile until after everyone else has already done their cool-down. In a perfect world, I would have done the program in 9 weeks. In reality, I took 13 weeks, and I still haven't reached the point of running five kilometers. But I kept at it until it was a habit, despite the heat and the sweat. In October I'll be running the AIDS Walk Washington 5th Annual 5K Run to raise money to fight HIV/AIDS in DC, a city that has extremely high rates of infection.

And once the running was well underway, I started watching what I eat. It was rarely about denying myself something, or staying under a calorie limit. Mostly, it was about being aware of the impact that different foods had to my diet and making conscious choices instead of saying "why not? who cares how bad it is for me when it's soooo tasty?". I've stopped using food for comfort, as an emotional fix when I'm upset or bored.

So now I'm a runner. I'm stronger. I'm healthier. I have a goal, and I'm seeing it through. I'm finding ways to keep going, even when it feels like I can't. And perhaps most important of all, I'm giving myself permission to be less than perfect. To need a slow day sometimes. To take a breather. To accept that starting from almost zero capability doesn't mean I can't, it means I can't yet. But I will keep trying, and I won't let myself make excuses about why I can't.

Baby Fever, Version 2.0

I seem to have developed a problem recently. The kind of problem that involves forgetting things.

Important things.

Like how utterly exhausted I was over the last 13 months.

That's right. I have baby fever again.

It feels like I see pregnant ladies and babies everywhere lately. Everyone else is having them. And they're so cute. And sweet. And not waking me up at midnight and 3 and 6 just after I fell back to sleep following my husband's alarm for work.

Oh right, I do like sleeping the night. In case anyone (including my ovaries) didn't know.

All kidding aside, I do seem to have developed a hyper-awareness of babies again, which tends to hone in on the tiniest, most precious, non-screaming ones. I went through this before Brianna was conceived. But that always felt more like a slap in the face from the universe, a reminder that so many others had them easily, sometimes unintentionally, while we had to wait and wait and wait some more.

This time, I think it's more of an awareness of how much Brianna has changed. She took her first steps last weekend, which officially ended my reign as Almost Competent Mother of Cute Baby and instead demoted me to Happy but Bewildered Toddler-Wrangler. She can say Hi (especially if you're a stranger in the supermarket), and All Done!, and has her own little name for the dog ("Re-ra" for Phedre). She's learning all these wonderful things, including dumping her food in her lap to see just how squishy yogurt can be (HELPFUL HINT #1: yogurt is gooey and you cannot wipe it off of high chair straps).

And with all of this comes the realization that I do not have a baby anymore. I'm thrilled to see her in this new stage, but at the same time I feel a pang of regret that I was so unable to enjoy her first weeks in our life. It's made me quite introspective about what I could have done differently, the help I would have insisted on, and whether I would be at the same risk for PPD with more realistic expectations and better self-care tools this time around.

And yet, even as I consider how much faster we could tackle it in a "next time" scenario, I have to be honest with myself about whether it would be a smart move for our family and for our marriage. Sometimes it takes everything in me to manage Brianna's needs, be a reasonably productive employee, not resort to cereal for dinner, and keep the house in good enough shape to not require HAZMAT suits. (HELPFUL HINT #2: don't stop by my house unannounced. ever.) And even then, I sometimes lose my cool and have to give myself a time out. I've come a long way from where I was last year, but the scars of having PPD haven't fully healed yet. I wasn't the only one affected by it, either; Andy had a huge burden, not just as my biggest supporter, but also to keep life going when I couldn't and fill the gaps for whatever Brianna needed that I couldn't give.

And, like just about every other family out there, we have to be sure we can provide for another child. We went through some unnervingly tight stretches financially, as we adjusted to the loss of disposable income and the ridiculous price of diapers.We've since figured out how to stay comfortable without going into debt, giving up on small luxuries, or working on the corner on a hot night for some extra money (which is good, because post-nursing boobs are hardly money-makers). (NOTE: I would only resort to hooking in the most dire circumstances, such as being unable to feed Brianna after a zombie apocalypse. That was more a joke for my mother. Hi Mom!)

So for now, we're giving ourselves some time. Time to save money, time to get our relationship back to rock solid, time to see how I handle the adjustments and frustrations of having a toddler. I've been on birth control that's just kind of meh for PCOS (more on that in another post soon-ish), but I'll stick with it for a few more months and wait for my boobs to stop tingling when I see a baby or a pregnant lady. It's been so tempting to go off the meds and rely on infertility to keep us in check. But right now, a pregnancy would be more than we're prepared to handle, and the constant guessing game of what my body is doing could lead me down a constant path of hoping and being disappointed.

Because I do want another baby. But right now is just not the time.

A Long Goodbye to Nursing

Back in December, I made the difficult decision to stop pumping at work. My supply had dwindled over time, until I was getting less than 4 oz. a day. I wasn't even able to supply one bottle a day for daycare. Even worse, I had spent a few weeks in denial that Brianna wasn't getting enough from me on the weekends. I thought she could get a lot more since she was nursing directly, compared to what I got from pumping with a noisy, awkward machine. But being home with her for a few days over Thanksgiving, I finally recognized just how hungry she was when she wasn't at daycare. So my husband and I agreed that we would do formula on the weekends and I would stop pumping at work, but I would continue nursing her first thing in the morning and to help her go to sleep at night.

It was a lot harder than I expected. I was never engorged, since I barely had any milk at that point anyway. But emotionally was another story. It felt so strange to give her a bottle instead of cuddling her up against my chest. And she still would root on my chest to signal her hunger when we screwed up the timing on getting a bottle for her, or when she was upset and wanted comfort. Those were the hardest times for me, to know she still wanted to nurse but I had nothing to give her.

It had been such a gradual decrease that I didn't feel any guilt over having to stop. I had known it was coming, both because my midwife had warned me that pumping just can't match a baby for keeping up supply and because I could see the drop-off, week by week, in the number of bottles of pumped milk we sent to daycare. The hormones, however, were another matter.

Friends had told me that it could be like being post-partum all over again. FANTASTIC. I spent all of my Christmas holiday being a complete bitch, or overly sensitive, or on really bad days, an overly sensitive bitch from hell. Like when I got mad at Andy for having the heat cranked up on an empty pan while he made me breakfast and so I turned it off like a pouty teenager and then was certain he was going to leave me for yelling at him about the pan. Poor Andy. I don't think it was much of a vacation for him on those days.

By the beginning of January, Brianna had cut down to just 5 minutes of nursing in the morning. She'd nurse for a moment, then look over her shoulder, or bite me, or smack my boob with her no-longer-quite-so-tiny fist. Sometimes she'd manage to do all three AT THE SAME TIME. One morning there had been an empty bottle on the table beside the glider. She stopped swatting me long enough to try to roll over and grab it. Clearly nursing wasn't doing anything for her anymore, so we switched to a bottle in the morning.

She took to it like there was nothing strange about no longer getting to start her day with a couple of nipple chomps and playing whack-a-mole with mommy's boobs. It sort of surprised me that she gave it up so easily, and I have to admit, I took it a bit personally. I wanted to have some sign that she missed it, that she wanted to start the day cuddling with me.

We still had bedtime nursing, which mostly consisted of two minutes of nursing and then throwing herself out of my arms to say "Look lady, put me in that damn crib already, I want to sleep and you won't stop shoving that boob in my face!" But that only lasted a couple weeks and then I got the cold from hell. The kind that you catch from a husband who snores when he's sick so you're already tired from not getting enough sleep. And then you start to wonder if sinuses are really all that necessary, and whether you should carve out your nose or just cut off your whole head so you can feel better. That kind of cold. And hoo-boy, decongestants go to work awfully fast at drying up mucus in your body. Unfortunately they're not kind enough to say, oh, that milk, you want to keep that? Okay, let's just get rid of the snot that makes you sniffly and unable to sleep and we'll be on our way. So that was the end of that adventure. I just wish I had realized it would be our last nursing session, because I would have snuggled her a bit more.

Cue crazy hormones one more time! Super bowl commercials this year tended to have a few more "heart-warmers" than usual. Especially fun was tearing up after a particularly sad-sweet Ronald McDonald House ad with a series pictures of a kid who is sick but it shows him getting better and the commercial ended with a healthy kid and parents who were happy because they had a place to go when their son was sick and children get better faster when families stay together during treatment and now everyone is happy and nobody is sick anymore, aren't you glad you have a healthy kid and if you don't, we have this wonderful place for you to stay together! And by "tearing up", I mean sobbing, but without any snot because the decongestants dried me out.

It wasn't just me, I swear. Andy almost cried too. Take that, hormones! You're not the only reason I was a basket case during most of the Super Bowl!

So yeah. Everything is back to normal now. I still get achy sometimes when I hear a baby crying, but I haven't leaked and my boobs look almost decent again. At first (TMI ALERT!) they were sort of sad looking, like someone shoved a juiced grapefruit in a stocking and forget to add extra stuffing to make it roundish instead of saggy and lumpy. You're welcome for that visual. Now they look better, as long as I've worn a bra all day. Not so pretty when I first wake up, but then again, it's not like I'm showing them off at 7am, because SOMEONE likes to wake up at 5:30 even on the weekends, which puts the kibosh on sexy fun time in the morning. [Yeah, yeah, welcome to parenthood. It's not really something I expected to have, but I do miss it. Especially going back to sleep afterward and then being woken up with breakfast in bed. Note to couples without kids: don't tell me about waking up "so early" at 8am, or I will drop off a visitor for you.]

I'm incredibly grateful to have kept up with breastfeeding as long as I did. Things very nearly ended in the first few weeks because her wonky latch made it so painful for the first minute or so. But then we got the hang of it, and nursing was wonderful. I'm sad to see it go, but then again the advent of top teeth has made me quite thankful to have not experienced bites in recent days. Everything worked out well, and I'm proud of myself. Now pass me some decongestants, I feel a cold coming on.