I am reliving my life from present to past. This means I am going backwards and spending four days reflecting on each year of my life. I go through old journals, my Google calendar, read old blog posts, look at pictures. It is going to take me a long time. I started in November and I should finish around May 2021. I am not a particularly nostalgic person. I like to think about the present and the future mostly so this is a stretch for me.
It is an interesting exercise, however, a gift that allows you to reconsider your own personal best of's and worst fails for each year and decide how you want to see them from now on. Each year that I go back, I feel younger, more alive, and I can see so clearly how the past plays into the present. I feel so thankful for the lessons I keep learning.
I had been looking forward to 2009 from the very beginning. It was the year I ran my first marathon, and I did it with Laura. It was a kind of reunion 18 years after spending an academic year in Liege, Belgium in 1990-1991. We did our training on this very blog. She lives in LeRoy, New York and I live in Trieste, Italy, so it was the perfect solution. We picked up friends along the way who ran with us. It was truly a magical time.
Laura and I are still partnering up on impossible projects, by the way. We spent most of 2020 writing together from a distance. We are getting close to submitting our first short story to a contest at the end of this month. We hope to finish our full-length play at the beginning of 2021.
She continues to inspire me and remind me of how much joy there is in trying new things. She is the embodiment of the Just Say Yes movement we started back in 2008.
Going back through our blog reminded me of how much running together gave me. It also reminded me that it hurt back then, too, that I also struggled with my diet and my weight back then, and that the same things that made me feel like crap then still make me feel like crap. So I decided to take the best of from that year and try to apply it to my life now. I started a 30-day get back to running program for people in their 40s and I am going to follow it to the letter. When I finish the thirty days I am going to make a marathon plan for 2021. These are the races I am looking at.
I just added the third after looking back at our blog.
1. Tromso Midnight Sun Marathon in Oslo, Norway. June 19, 2021
2. The Venice Marathon, October 24, 2021
3. Rochester Marathon, September 2021
I think we need something to work for in 2021. It's such a dreary and depressing time with all of this Covid stuff. Let's take the best of 2009 and make it happen in 2021.
Laura? What do you think?
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