The Road to 40 Day 349/365: Drag-My-Feet-To-Run Day

While the motivation certainly hasn’t waned, there are times when I feel like it’s difficult to push through with my routine.

I don’t think I’m in the right headspace mentally and emotionally, but I don’t really know how to deal with it. When I go through these things, I sometimes think to myself, can I really have episodes like these?

Putting myself in other people’s shoes, I’d often think I don’t have the right to feel these things because I’m in a really enviable position – I don’t deal with people at work, and I only need to worry about taking care of our family of three. We live in a pretty safe country, and despite being an expensive country to live in, we’re blessed to be able to get by relatively comfortably.

I was raised with a mindset of being happy with what I have because there are other people who can’t have what I have. As a result, I would shove certain thoughts and feelings to the side and focus my energy on other things.

I think I do a good job at it most of the time, but there comes a time when I feel it’s just there no matter how much I try to repress it. This constant cycle of self-reflection leads me to question actions and decisions or try to rationalize it in order to find a way to deal with the consequences.

During these times, I can’t hide it from myself, and my body responds accordingly. I shut down. It feels difficult to put a smile on. I doomscroll my way to pass the time.

Running could be an escape – a physically demanding activity that could push me to forget about those feelings for a moment. However, my legs just feel heavy.

Still, I needed to show up for myself.

After sending Vino to school, I warmed up and started to run home. Initially, I wanted to run through Kent Ridge Park despite the crazy elevations. However, since it really felt heavy to run, I decided to go through the Pasir Panjang route.

These days, I’ve been curious about how far I could run and if I could do 10 kilometers with no issues. I got to seven in Korea, but the heat here and my overpacing myself have me stuck at around five or six kilometers. While I want to push myself, I don’t want to die doing it.

It was a tough run today with all these things running through my head. I had several stops because I was gassed, and some because my heart rate was up to 150. Still, I managed to run further than I should have and stopped right before heading up the slope to our house.

I felt that my shirt was heavy from the sweat and took a photo of it. Sometimes, people would joke about my sweat-laden shirt being so wet it could be wrung dry, so I actually tried it today and got all that sweat out.

Che was working from home again, because while she felt a bit better, she didn’t want to be blamed for spreading the flu in their office if suddenly people got sick after she came to work. That meant I needed to prepare lunch for us.

If I were alone at home, I’d probably choose not to cook anything and just eat during dinner. However, her schedule’s packed, so she needs to have something to eat while on short breaks.

I got some leftover meat from the night before, as well as rice and kimchi to make kimchi fried rice. On the side, I made ensaladang talong, which was going to be a quick cook. While kimchi fried rice is often served with eggs, Che doesn’t like hers to have one, so I decided to put salted eggs and tomatoes on the side.

This was pretty heavy for lunch, and I had rice, so I told myself I shouldn’t have dinner later on. We had a cleaner coming in, and we decided to just order in for dinner.

We went to the room early, but Vino still went to sleep close to 11pm. He usually has a lot of delaying tactics whenever it’s sleeping time, which I may have also been doing when I was his age. The difference is that while I probably would be rolling on the bed for quite a while, Vino would be out really quickly after a few minutes – proof that he’s really tired, and just finding ways to stay up.

I’m hoping for a better mindset tomorrow and have fresh motivation to do what I need to do. 

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