Finding inspiration within.

Today was a fairly short run, as I didn't sleep well last night. Since I didn't sleep well, I ended up sleeping later than I anticipated this morning. My sleep habits are really screwed up right now. It needs to change, because my sleep affects my feelings, emotions, stress, motivation.... and on and on.

A few years ago, when I was working at Bob Evans and going to school, I talked to a manager about how I was struggling with my work schedule and my school schedule together. She wasn't too receptive and didn't cut my hours, because I was, apparently, a great worker. Blah blah blah. It got me thinking, though. To your boss, work comes first, to your profs, school comes first. Where is the happy medium? I believe that I've found my happy medium... in a mix of school and work, among other things. School is constantly at the forefront of my mind. Being a grad student, I'm SO concerned about school, about studying, about my grades... it's the most important thing to me at this point in my life. However, work is important, too. I've got to have money in order to pay my bills, to go to school, to exist fully. I didn't move 900 miles to run out of money and move back. This is a huge deal.

Coming between school and work in my "list of important things in my life" is running. I never thought that running would become such a large part of my life. It did. I do struggle with it from time to time. I struggle with motivation. Running helps me to have a release. I often run with Katherine, which is nice. We don't have a lot of free time together and running helps us to have some time to talk and spend time together in a busy existance. Running by myself helps me to clear my head, much like writing has for years and years. Obviously it also has other positives too... like health, exercise, endorphins...

It's inspiring to be able to write about my running. I've always fancied myself a writer... since I was 11 or 12 when I started writing poetry. Before that, I wrote some stories and wanted to grow up to be a writer, but the middle school angsty poetry was what really made me feel like I had gotten to that point. Now I'm blogging, I've taken a ton of creative writing classes, I love to write and I want to do something with my writing to live off of forever. I feel like this blog is the beginning of that. I CAN write about running... no two runs are the same. Obviously, some runs have more interesting information and can make for more readable entries than others, but there is an abundant amount of information to share about running. One of my hopes is that, through my writing, I'm able to inspire both MYSELF and other people. I'm mostly hoping to inspire myself, because that is clearly a more feasible dream at this point.

Anyways, I'm kind of going on and on. I've found two runs that I'm interestedin running in November. Both are in Florida. I'm hoping to meet other Florida ...Orlando specifically... runners and to build some sort of a running support group. I've been briefly looking at different running clubs. I'd just really like to meet other runners down here.

Anyways, my run today was short, as I previously mentioned. I ran a little over 2 miles with Kath, which was great, because, honestly, I didn't feel like running at all. I'm so glad that we went. Tomorrow, I have a huge test that I'm really nervous about. After that, I'm hoping to run 5 or 6 miles. I need to get my mileage up if I want to run a half marathon in two months!

So far: 554.19 miles
To go: 445.81