Courtenay Brown

Complete loss of momentum, lack of energy, and surplus of time on my hands with which I know not what to do. Go away, rest week! Or at least send me some good Netflix to watch! (Which, tomorrow, This Is It arrives!).

It’s actually not so bad. I am catching up on emails, I scrubbed my brother’s sink and intend to maybe clean some more stuff, walked 3 blocks to the store, maybe I’ll do my nails, and then chicken out on posting some incendiary comments on either Slowtwitch or the elitebeat forum.

I’m also giving up my coffee habit (last vestige of my time at Amazon!), and tomorrow I’m swimming with Rachel. Last time we swam together we really just stood at the shore and talked, but that was a year and a half ago, back when I thought that all I had to do to get better at swimming was show up and get my hair wet. Now I know that my skin should also get wet, and ideally I will get somewhat out of breath, and then I will get better.

Ben left earlier today, which made me sad and definitely hasn’t helped my inertia. I’ll see him in two weeks, when we are both in Colorado, yay! But after that, it could be a long time before I’m reunited with my one-and-only. He’s going to be in Colorado Springs, plus various races around the globe (and no I don’t know which ones, nor does he from what I can deduce after eavesdropping on 10,000 calls and emails about the ITU points system and USAT selection criteria and rankings and qualifiers and what? yawn. I am supportive, I swear, but that whole system is alienatingly cumbersome.) Meanwhile I’m going to be “floating” until I start grad school, which could be any time from early June until late September, and any place from Santa Barbara to Seattle, Boulder, D.C., Boston, New York, and Durham.

Uncertainty is good for me because it forces me to just chill out and stop overanalyzing. I just focus on one step at a time, kind of like a workout that seems so overwhelming that you just look at the beginning and do one unit, one interval, one set at a time until suddenly it’s done!