All inside

On my way home from meeting some friends on the Lower East Side: perfect for a bike-ride all the way along the river, especially beautiful at night. Photos do not do it justice. The lights reflecting on the surface of the river, the bridges connecting our little island to the rest of the world, the lights of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building right there next to each other - at least it looks that way - I could have stopped on every meter to take another picture, but then I would have never made it home. Truly awe-inspiring sight: last night, they made me feel like the city used to make me feel when I first moved here, which is hard to describe... all I know is that is makes me tear up and feel very lucky. Happiness I guess. The ability to be in that moment, see not just look, observe the beautiful and the magical and let it just be and let myself just be, in that moment. Happiness.

The good thing about not being able to run has been that I have been out on my bike pretty much every day. I need the exercise, it doesn't hurt to ride the bike - walking only hurts a little now, without the monstrous boot :) - and I need to make my money's worth since after my last bike was stolen, I impulse-bought this new, slightly more expensive machine the day after. No regrets. Quite the opposite, actually: even though it only has one gear and every little hill is a challenge, I really like it, it's much smoother and I love the simplicity - no gears, no colors, no trouble - it helps that I now have 2 locks and obsessively lock both wheels and the frame every time I stop. Earlier in the day, I biked up on the West Side by the Hudson all the way to George Washington Bridge and back, which took almost 2 hours. Perfect weather, perfect bike path all along, not too crowded, everything would have been perfect if not for my chain giving a really loud squeaky noise when I pedaled. A little oil did the trick when I made it to the bike store, but every time I had passed people, they were covering their ears, which is what I wanted to do for those 2 hours too!

Where I want to get with all this is the following: I have always been a "cup half empty" kinda gal. I always found the worst in every situation, never let myself be happy in the moment - I think I never even stopped to notice the moment - always worried about the future and thought too much about past with too much nostalgia. I was the kind of person who would say that "only if" this or that were the case, then I would be content: Only if I lived somewhere else (New York), only if I didn't HAVE to do certain things (studying or fencing), only if I found a nice boyfriend, only if, only if... always some external circumstance that I could blame for not liking the situation I was in. Then there came a point where I realized that I could not depend on things outside of my control and that in fact, it was myself I didn't like, and that the only way I was gonna reach the things I set out to reach was to learn to like myself and could be content regardless of external circumstances (well, mostly).

The most important thing I realized was that always being negative is really depressing: it creates more and more negatives and the next thing you know, you're stuck in an endless cycle of negatives. Sometimes it's the easiest to dwell on a bad situation, a break-up, a passive-aggressive boss, an injury or a bad mood and feel sorry for ourselves. If we play the victim, maybe others will feel sorry for us too and we don't have even try to deal with and maybe make the situation better. It's much harder to try to look for the source of the problem and change something to make it better. Change is scary and sometimes it leads to unknown territories, physically and emotionally. But unless we try, we will never know whether it's gonna be better. And this is something I have been struggling with so much lately: there is nothing scarier than going against the current and leaving the smooth, nicely paved road for a path yet unpaved, not knowing where it might lead and what might wait along the way. I have to overcome my fear before I can reach my dreams.

To start - well, I didn't even know it at the time - a friend lent me a book written by a Hungarian philosopher, called "The magic of every-day life". Sounds a little cliche and a little like a self-help book. Maybe it is - but nobody could tell I was reading a self-help book since it's in Hungarian :) In the end, it was filled with some cliches, some big ideas, new ideas, things I totally disagreed with, things that are so obvious but I had never thought of before; it's almost a "how-to-guide" to life. And then there was this list of "guidelines to a better life" or what she calls it, "how to get along with people", that I love and thus, will try to translate to the best of my ability:

1. We can only conquer this world, made up of unending fights and filled with constant change, by being even more dynamic, making more effort and never giving up.
2. Determination ends where magic begins.
3. Our behavior, inside and out, our thoughts, words and movements are all magical manifestations.
4. Everything material is born out of ideas, including our diseases, failures, and bad fate.
5. Healthy, constructive, harmonizing thoughts create balance in our bodies and our circumstances.
6. For one to have control over his or her fate, overcome depression and demonic ties, one has to be able to control his or her thoughts.
7. To think is to have an effect.
8. Treating those around us with grace and kindness creates an invisible, psycho-magnetic zone around us.
9. We cannot think with the intensity of a feeling or passion without those around us being unconsciously aware of those thoughts.
10. For every phenomenon, without exception, there has to be a moment of conception, and every later development depends on that moment.
11. One who wants to receive has to give first.
12. By changing the way we approach our circumstances, we can actually change our circumstances.

What I took away from this book and this short list is that at the end, our happiness or unhappiness, our circumstances and the way we are and we are seen by others are all inside us. Nobody else but I myself can stop me from reaching my highest potential and greatest happiness!

Now, keeping these things in mind, go out there without fear and conquer the world!

New trend in women's footwear

I got my sexy boot today, ugh, took some time to figure out how to walk in it... not sure how long I can tolerate this, for god's sake, it's a little fracture in my foot, why do I have to wear this knee-high monstrosity???

Fractures

This whole blog was born out of frustrations I was experiencing about 10 months ago, related to not being able to run because of an injury. I was an inexperienced runner trying to do too much too quickly and it was not surprising that I got hurt. At the end, things worked out the way they were supposed to: I learned a lot about training, and I still got to run the marathon in Miami, although with less than optimal training.

My timing is much much worse this time around. Just 2 and a half months before the NYC marathon, I managed to get a stress fracture in my foot. And this time around, I was training much smarter, not increasing milage so quickly, taking some rest days, cross-training, and everything was going so well up until 2 weeks ago... after the half marathon, I knew that something was wrong. It took till last night to get an MRI and confirm the fracture. I guess I had mentally prepared myself for this, and so now that I know the diagnosis, I am not as upset as I expected myself to be. The order: 6 weeks of rest from the time of the injury, which means 4 more weeks from now, which means no marathon in 8 weeks. Maybe in 2010, if it's meant to be...

Night bus

1am Monday morning on the 907 night bus. It takes me a few stops to realize that I am sitting across from an elementary school classmate. I am quite sure it's him: he looks the same as when we were 10, somewhat older and a lot bigger. I even remember his name, I think it suits him so well too. He's reading a book, holding his laptop case very tightly. For a while, I try to make eye contact; maybe if he recognizes me too, we would chat and for some reason I am really interested in finding out what has become of him. He clearly feels uncomfortable when he realizes that I am looking at him, and lifts the book higher so I can't see his face any more. Then I remember that he had always been like that; looking back now, I am pretty sure he's autistic, but those things weren't talked about or diagnosed back then in Hungary. We just thought he was a really weird kid.

Now embarrassed, I start paying attention to other things on the bus. A girl got on at the same stop as me, she is wearing all black and her face is covered with piercings. She's also holding a half of a watermelon, a huge one too. Strange combination, I think. She turns around to see a guy sleeping: he is wearing mostly leather and has a huge tatoo on his neck, slightly intimidating. Apparently, not to her: she taps him on the shoulder and asks him where he's getting off, telling him she is worried that he might miss his stop cuz he is sleeping. Very confused, he closes his eyes again without bothering to answer. She then starts chatting up another guy on the bus, this one awake. She talks about genetically engeniereed watermelons, how they must be imported from America and that's why they are so big. I am not even sure if the guy gets to say a single word. She goes on to talk about living in America. As they are both getting off at the same stop, they are standing right next to me so I can hear him asking where she was living in America. She says Jersey. Not even New Jersey, just Jersey. He has no clue where that is so she explains that it's about an hour south of New York on the East Coast. As they step off, I hear her saying that despite its proximity to NY, Jersey is super boring... then they are about to turn in different directions, and the last thing I hear her say is that she can walk either way, so they head off together into the night... I wonder where they ended up with that huge watermelon.

Tinsel of light

From Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge:

...You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind...

I imagine little shiny silver pieces of tinsel - or the little lights that fall in every direction after fireworks blow up high in the sky - hanging somewhere in a place where we keep feelings locked away, feelings we no longer want to or are allowed to feel... waiting for a breeze to come along and move them just enough that this place within our minds might awake.

Love till the end

I am walking down a dimly lit corridor smelling slightly of urine. The doors leading into patient rooms on the sides are mostly open and even if I try not to look, when I walk by, I can't help myself from peaking in. Inside every room, there is a sad story; a story of a life, coming to an end. One of these stories is my Babi's: she is no longer aware of what's happening around her, but I see in her eyes that when we step into her room, she is happy.

We're walking down the same corridor, chatting with the cute nurse, Victor. He is funny, tries to bring some love and humour into the routines of being a geriatric nurse in a nursing home. Another old lady is walking in front of us, just barely moving. Victor sees her and says that she'll be happy to see him, he is joking about her being in love with him. I have to admit, he is the light in this place. he runs up to her and kisses her on the cheek and pets her on the head, like you would with a toddler. When we catch up with the lady, she is glowing and excited: I got a kiss, she says with a huge grin on her face, I got a kiss, she keeps repeating. A moment later she is back in her own world and turns around to walk in the other direction, perhaps already forgetting about Victor's kiss. But for a moment that day, he made her smile and blush like teenage girls do when they see the boy they have a crush on.

Not so easy

I have to admit I was a little over-confident about this past weekend's NYC Half Marathon. I had been training consistently but probably not targeted enough - as in training for a distance or pace or hills or whatever - I have just been running, sort of as it feels good. I am not willing to change that but I have to realize that races I feel prepared for will still be incredibly difficult. Like the half was...

It didn't help that it was already warm and humid at 7am when the race started and it only got much worse as we neared the finish line. We ran a loop and a little bit in Central Park, which was the usual, but mentally, it's so different to be running a lap in the park or a half marathon. So the whole time we were in CP, I was looking forward to the second half of the race that would be on city streets. Then we finally exited the park on to 7th Ave to run down to Times Square - definitely the coolest part of the race - where music was playing and people were cheering and the atmosphere was awesome, then out to the Hudson on 42nd street. This part was almost easy: I became rather emotional seeing the wide, empty avenue with all the people lining up on the sides, and seeing the big screens of Times Square and feeling like I was a part of this big thing that people were there to watch. The exhilaration of a competition, I guess.

Then on the West Side Highway, things started getting really painful: hot, sunny, flat (I think I prefer hills where I can rest on the downhill even if it's hard up the hill) and the miles just seemed to be getting longer and longer. I heard someone yell "Dig deep!" on the side, I suppose, in response to the many tortured faces running by, and I started reflecting on that and saying to myself that I had to take this one step at a time and not think so much about the finish line or the next mile marker, which seemed forever away. In the end I finished just under 2 hours, which was my goal, I didn't pass out as some people along the course, I was very happy to change into dry clothes and flip-flops and head out to a huge brunch with a bunch of people who ran the race.

Today, I am in pain. The combination of the heat and dehydration and torturous last few miles resulted in lots of blisters and sore muscles. I guess it means I tried pretty hard, which I feel great about, although I am having issues walking today. Oh well, the rest of the weekend was really fun, spending time with friends, walking around the city, going out to Governor's Island... even found an interesting-looking palm tree with the best view of the city.