Last weekend, my BFF, Sarah, made me run another 5k with her. Chris said that since I have now run two 5k’s, I am officially a runner. But I don’t think it counts if the ONLY time you run is when your friend drags you through a 5k…
(Do you like our socks???)
I put pictures on Facebook and Twitter and I had so many people congratulating me on being so “athletic.”
I feel like I should clarify.
I am about as athletic as a bag of Doritos. I want to work out. I want to be healthy. But I just don’t have time! And, I know, I know. You make time for what is important. But I have made time for my job, my kids, my husband, this blog, my home life, my church life, and, occasionally, a good book. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for any other priorities right now. So, working out falls to the wayside.
Well, not the wayside exactly. I try to let it fall to the wayside, but freaking Sarah keeps trying to force me into healthy living. At least every other day, Sarah calls to ask me to go do something healthy – walk around the neighborhood (yes, we grew up together, teach together, and we now live in the same neighborhood), go for a jog, explore a nature park, take a yoga class. Every other day, Sarah calls or texts me with some activity for us to try. Which means every other day, I have to come up with an excuse. It’s becoming tiresome.
LET’S STOP THE CHARADE, SARAH!
But, she won’t stop. She is tenacious and unforgiving. It’s kind of like I’ve stepped in chewing gum and it won’t come off my shoe. I keep telling her I liked her better when all we did was drink and shop, but she will have none of my complaints. She’s tough, that Sarah.
So, last weekend, we ran a 5k. Well, “ran” is really ambiguous. Bless her athletic, vegan, little heart. She stuck by me the entire time and pretended to be as winded as I was. I started out alright. For the first mile(ish), I ran pretty good. I was passing people, tossing my hair, and picturing myself looking somewhat similar to those paparazzi pictures of Carrie Underwood when she works out. Then, I got a cramp in my side just as we came up on the first mile marker.
Now, I would like to pause here and appreciate the fact that I even made it a MILE. The last time I ran was in December at a 5k in Sea World. A mile without dying was a miracle to me.
With that cramp, I told Sarah I thought we had to stop and walk a bit.
“Oh, good,” Sarah said politely. “I’m tired, too.”
Now that was just a blatant lie. Sarah runs all the time and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t sweat. Like, ever. So the fact that she pretended to need a break for my sake was nice of her. We slowed to a quick walk pace for about 10 minutes.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I’m ready.”
We started running again for about 5 minutes and then I was POSITIVE I was going to either:
a) throw up
b) pass out
c) die
We were running on a cobblestone road and I really think that it was looking down at those cobblestones that made me suddenly get sick to my stomach. Well, those and the fact that in the past two months I hadn’t run further than to my car in the Target parking lot when it was raining. I told Sarah we had to stop.
“Oh, good,” Sarah chirped happily. “I’m winded.”
But she didn’t look winded. She looked windblown in that sitting-beside-a-breezy-beach-drinking-a-margarita way. But she stopped and walked with me anyway.
And we never ran again.
I walked the last almost two miles and I thought I was going to either:
a) throw up
b) pass out
c) kill someone…preferably Sarah
In the last fourth of a mile, the cameras and crowds started lining the street and yelling to encourage us. I wanted to yell back at them to shut the hell up and let me die in peace, but Sarah insisted that we actually RUN across the finish line. When I started running again, I couldn’t feel my legs. At all. I figured that meant either:
a) I was about to throw up
b) I was about to pass out
c) my legs had actually fallen off sometime during the second mile and I hadn’t even noticed
But, I did it. Dammit. I ran my short, fat legs across that finish line and I even resisted the urge to hit the runners who had already finished the race and looked all fresh-faced as they cheered for us and congratulated us. So, there’s a win. Nobody got punched.
The moral of this pathetic story? Find friends who are lazier than you and who want you to become lazier than them, instead of friends who want you to be healthy and live a long, full life. Those kinds of friends are overrated. So is running.
It is so flippin’ hard to make friends as adults. It is especially hard to make friends as adults when you have wee ones. I meet a lot of moms through my kids, and those are really great friendships because it gives you someone to commiserate with through motherhood. That’s an absolute necessity for survival. But aside from our kids, I usually don’t have much in common with these women, so our friendship never really develops past “How are your kids doing?” “Great! How are yours?” “Great! Okay, bye!” And being friends with people who don’t have kids is kind of tricky sometimes because most of them want to have children someday and so I don’t want to scare them by showing them the full, unfiltered Brown Family Craze.
They’d never procreate.
What complicates friendships even more for me is being a working mom. One of the special challenges that come with working with a young family is that my free time becomes incredibly precious. (But isn’t everyone’s free time precious?) I can’t really get together with people on week nights because I don’t get home until 5:00, then there’s dinner, baths, bedtimes, and, hopefully, a little down time with Chris before I have to start blogging. Throw in a class or two of papers to grade and my weeknights keep me active until about 11:00 every night. Weekends are awesome, but my first priority is always spending time with my family. We don’t get to hang out and do stuff during the week, so weekends are when we are on the go together. It’s not that those plans can’t be changed, but I’m just not willing to give up parts of my weekend every weekend. And friendships (especially new ones) require some time and commitment. How will I ever get to know someone if I don’t make time for them? BUT WHAT TIME IS LEFT?!?!? I have started some really great friendships over the past year, but finding the time to grow and maintain them has been a real struggle.
All of these things are working against me these days and so I am friendless.
Well, except for Sarah.
And then, a friend appeared!
She is actually one of Chris’s co-workers and I kept seeing her at his work functions. Whenever we hung out at those events, we got along so great. She is my age, doesn’t have any kids, but her boyfriend that she lives with has a little girl about Bean’s age. So, she’s almost like a working mom, too, and – bonus! – our kids don’t even know each other! So, we got to know each other for, like, real!
I swear, making friends is the exact same process as dating someone. Seriously. It’s ridiculous how giddy I get about potential friends.
At Chris’s office Christmas party, we hung out and I got the distinct feeling that she was ready to take our friendship to the next level. So, I got her email address (which is like a phone number, these days…) from Chris and I emailed her an invitation to a jewelry party that I was going to at Sarah’s house.
I HAD A DATE!
I was so excited! My new friend is super chic and trendy. She reminds me a lot of my sister, actually. As all good friends should. So, I thought all week about what I was going to wear on our date.
(I settled on jeans and a long sleeve casual tee and a chunky sweater wrap, for those of you who are interested…)
Finally, date night came and my new friend came by my house so we could ride over to the jewelry party together. We had such a fun night! She got to meet a few of my co-workers, old friends from high school, and, of course, Sarah. It was critical that Sarah approve of my new friend. I kept sneaking looks at Sarah to see what she thought and finally she pulled me aside and gave me the big verdict, “She’s fantastic!” she whispered. “We have to all go to lunch soon!”
LUNCH! My new friend had officially been approved.
After such a successful first date, it was time to try out the next dreaded phase of forming new adult friendships. The foursome.
I invited my new friend and her long-time, live-in boyfriend over to our house for dinner one night. They brought her boyfriend’s daughter, who played awesome with Bean for hours, and dinner was really nice. We all seemed to get along great and the conversation flowed naturally. When they left that night, I turned to Chris (who, oddly, knows my new friend better than I do because they work together) and asked if he thought they’d had a good time.
“Definitely,” he said. “It was a good night.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I think it went well.”
I went to sleep that night so excited about my new friendship. Things were going along swimmingly! Maybe our next date should be a dinner out. Alone. How exciting!!
And then the next morning when I got to work, Chris sent me an email that said after dinner the night before, my new friend and her boyfriend of several YEARS had gone home and broken up.
Uhhhhh…. what??????
Yep. They broke up.
“What the hell did you say to them when I was in the bathroom???” I replied to Chris’s email.
When I texted her that afternoon, she insisted it had been a long time coming and that it was not, in fact, my lasagna that had broken them up. But still.
WHAT KIND OF FRIEND AM I?!??!
My BFF, Sarah, is a health nut. She’s vegetarian (and, except for her unnatural love of cheese, I think she’d probably even be vegan). She eats organic. She goes to the gym every day. She rides her bike to my house when she comes over. She eats Reduced Fat Oreoes. She looks fantastic. Better than I think I’ve ever seen her look before. She’s lean, glowing, trimmed, and toned. Basically, I hate her about 98% of the time.
On the other hand, I am not a health nut. I love meat, especially red meat. I eat whatever is on sale at the grocery store. I haven’t been to the gym in a few years, and even when I was going, I mostly just walked around in athletic gear and tried to look busy. I eat regular Oreoes. My only real source of exercise is chasing my kids around, which actually is quite a work out since we moved to a house with three flights of stairs. But, generally speaking, I’m not living my best life. Dr. Oz would hang his head in shame.
So, a month ago when Sarah called me up in the middle of our dinnertime/bath time/bed time chaos and shouted over the kids into the phone, “I THINK WE SHOULD DO A 5K,” I must have been drunk when I said, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” The next thing I knew, I received an email notification that confirmed my registration with the Sea World Reindeer Run. And, quite honestly, I didn’t think about the race again until this past Thursday when the race was two days away. I probably wouldn’t have even thought about it then except people found out about it and started asking me questions.
Like, what kind of training had I been doing? Ummmm….
And, how long had I been training? Hmmmm…
I started to get even more nervous on Friday night at 11:30pm when I frantically went through everything I owned trying to find SOMETHING that resembled running attire. (I eventually settled for yoga pants and a fitted tee…) But 6:00am Saturday morning when Sarah picked me up at my house, I was just outright hysterical. I was laughing and laughing and joking and laughing and asking, “Why, Sarah? Why do you hate me? Why must you hurt me so?” By 7:30 when the race started, I was begging, “Please, Sarah, please! Let’s go to Dunkin Donuts and eat chocolate sprinkled donuts and drink hot chocolate! No one will know! We’ve got our number thingies. We’ll just tell people we ran it!”
But she said no.
She’s mean and I am now reconsidering our 15 year friendship.
It was my first race of any kind and I was blown away by the crowds of people. It was packed! Sarah had registered us online (because she wanted to be sure I didn’t back out…she’s clever and knows me well…), so we had to wait in line to get our packets on the morning of the race. It was crazy chaotic, but I was focused. I wanted one of the bright green runners tee’s. I thought they were hard core. We finally made it to the front of the line and they handed me my shirt and, suddenly, I had confidence. I could do this. Heck, I might even WIN this!
MILE ONE:
Mile One was surprisingly better than I thought. I ran just about the entire mile and Sarah and I even talked while we ran. I felt like Lance Armstrong in yoga pants.
MILE TWO:
Mile Two was a little shaky. We alternated between running and me gasping for breathe, begging Sarah to stop. I should also point out here that Sarah is about a foot taller than me and her legs are at least twice the length of my legs. I think that contributed to my slow death right there in the middle of Sea World. I’d just like to make sure people know that for the record.
MILE THREE:
“Oh,” I thought. “This is what death feels like.”
Seriously. I thought I was going to die. By this point, running was not an option. Unless, of course, we were near a place where crowds could see us or cameras were on us. Then we’d run. And when I got a text message from Chris saying they were there and waiting for us, we started running then, too. And we smiled, too. Nothing would have been worse than to have our husbands see us gasping for air and being outrun by these two little twits…
When we finally crossed the finish line, though, I will reluctantly admit that it was pretty darn satisfying and for a split second I sort of, kind of, maybe understood why people do this race/running/gasping for air thing.
Although, I do very much prefer the chocolate covered sprinkle donuts and hot chocolate thing, instead.
*******
P.S. Enter to win a $50 American Express gift card from Apartment Guide over on my review page! Click here!
09Oct
This weekend we had friends in town from New York. It was going to be a killer, fun-filled, action-packed weekend. Chris and I took off on Friday and the plan was that while they boys all went to play golf, I’d take the kids up to my parent’s house for the weekend. Saturday we were going to Universal Studios and then that night to a nice dinner at the Hard Rock Hotel at Universal. Sunday, I was supposed to go pick up the kids from my parents.
The first thing that wasn’t according to plan was a really great surprise. The fourth friend in the guy’s Man Quad, Brett, surprised everyone and flew down Thursday afternoon. It was a GREAT surprise!
But the rest of the changes in plans weren’t quite so fun. On Friday morning, the rains came down. And they didn’t stop.
I still took the kids up to my parents, but just about every other plan we made was ruined by the rain. The guys tried to go golfing, but ended up stranded in the clubhouse due to a bad thunderstorm. They were FORCED to spend the next few hours at the club bar, I was told.
Friday night we ate dinner out and everyone crossed their fingers that the rain would clear out by our Universal day the next morning. No such luck. We woke up to even harder rain. But that’s the great thing about good friends. Sometimes the best laid plans aren’t nearly as fun as the plans you don’t make.
We stayed in our PJ’s pretty much all day. By 10:00, everyone was awake and congregating in the kitchen, where we all started making a big breakfast.
By the time breakfast was over, it was 1:00 in the afternoon. We were all still sitting in our PJ’s at the breakfast table and the rain still came down in buckets. Not wanting to do much other than continue sitting there, we spent almost the whole afternoon playing card games at the dining room table and somewhere along the way, beer replaced orange juice…
That night we all finally showered and got dressed and headed out to a really good dinner at The Kitchen, a casual dining restaurant in the Hard Rock Hotel. It was fabulous! We had a five course meal and quite a few cocktails, too.
And let me tell you about the most amazing dessert I have ever had in my whole life. It was called the Elvis Presley Special. It was a funnel cake stuffed with chocolate sauce, peanut butter, and bananas, then deep fried and topped with powdered sugar. Seriously. I dreamed about this dessert last night. It was so good. It was so good, in fact, that I got carried away and forgot to take a picture of it before I devoured it.
When we got home, we worked off all that chocolate and funnel cake with a few exciting hours of charades. Which, by the way, I KILLED.
Sunday morning, I went to pick up the kids while the boys went out to lunch and we spent the rest of the rainy afternoon hanging around with the wee ones. They hadn’t seen Bean since he was nine months old and they’d never met Gracie. Seeing them all play together was pretty awesome.
As I write this, Gracie is down for the night, Chris is putting Bean to bed, and I’m blogging on the couch next to three of my favorite boys as they watch football. They are all flying out tomorrow and we should probably be celebrating with some kind of big dinner or something, but we’re going to keep hanging out on the couch, watching football, and eating chili.
It’s cool here today from all the rain we’ve had this weekend, but you’d never know from inside my house. Both my heart and home are full and warm.
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