Playing Catch-up in a 24/7 World

So here we are. A new world. Maybe not a brave new edition, but the current version. During the last few months the common denominator is flux. New baby, new boss, new home. All of these things are awesome. Coaching, working 50+ hours a week, and running on four or less hours of non-continuous sleep each night. Planning, preparing and hosting a college cross country conference championship meet from scratch (with infinite amounts of assistance and grace from my supervisor and co-workers). Still loving and supporting my awesome wife, maintaining involvement in the lives of friends. Heck, I still found time to run and race three times the last six months.

Yet there remains only so much waking time per day and the allotment remains overbooked. But the desire to engage the world through writing and processing thoughts in this location never once left my mind. Holding a crying infant at the most unholy of hours, driving 12-passenger vans across the upper midwest, logging a thrice weekly 30-60 minute run and leading over 100 team practices allows lots of time for asking questions and pondering answers but little time to post a coherent response.

As the new year flew by, the naive notion of 52 posts over the 2016 calendar year flowed through my mind. Yep, it's the last week of March and here we are...entry number one. I assure anyone interested enough to actually follow, that I will not attempt to play catch-up over a brief period of time. But I do assure you that there are plenty of entries rolling around in my very dizzy mind.

For now, I'm pleased to say my six month old, handsome, talented, runny nosed, future olympian son is sleeping enough during the day that I might actually get back to writing regularly. You might even see pictures posted here. I am a competitor, especially with myself. So stay tuned as I attempt to play catch-up in world that just keeps on running.

Hopefully I'll be back soon to talk about books I'm reading, training questions I'm asking and other random items that roll through my head while I'm rolling down the river road logging miles in my office on the run.

Embracing Life on Good and Bad Days

Tomorrow is not a guarantee. Do not put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Words never more applicable to my life the last few weeks. A bit more than a month ago I had a seizure. All that I remember was sitting in my office at work at my desk constructing an email to a recruit and talking across the hall to my supervisor. The next memory is waking up in the hospital with my wife looking down upon my body laying in an emergency room.

Things checked out at the hospital and I was cleared to leave and resume regular activities with the exception of driving a car, which will have to wait for three more months. Since then an EEG and an MRI have been conducted and there is a pending appointment with a seizure clinic. Things would appear okay.

But are they? How do you really know if things are every truly okay? The truth is there are very few guarantees in our lifetime. After this experience I have been forced to evaluate my lifestyle. The way I spend my time. Who I spend my time with and what we do with those encounters. I sat at my home office last week after a week of much needed vacation. I looked upon pictures of my wife and I, a curio cabinet holding my marathon medals and a laminated 11x16 photo collage from the North Central University cross country season of 2006 and finally some Bibles and books from Christian authors that I am currently reading.

In one sideways sweep of my head, I encountered the visual representation of the things that are truly important in my life.

My wife. The time we have together is so special, she is my world, my treasure.

Running, my outlet, my artistic expression, often neglected because of "life".

The team I coach, the people in that picture who were a part of a dual NCCAA National Championship season, represent my passion at its purest, most meaningful form.

My Faith. The blood and the water that give my life purpose; that allow me to be a husband to my wife, that give my endless miles a meaning beside just the monotonous shaping of my physical man. Coaching, the thing I've been given to do with my life, matters more than just finding new ways to be good at sport.

Does my day to day life allow complete commitment to those areas? Do I give myself space to recover from the grind of day to day life so that I can embrace both the great and the bad elements of living? The truth is I need to embrace each today for what it holds and commit to living in those moments completely.

For better or worse it took an unfortunate event to help me realize how fortunate I am to live a full life each day. I hope to do that more thoughtfully in the future. And I encourage you to do so too.