Hard Road

One thing I feel about my life here is it comes in waves. Hectic waves. Boring waves. Bar waves. Staying home waves. Running waves. NON-running waves. Last week started great – gym, Hashing, running. Then it just fell apart. I miss the Running Room and I miss having a plan and a schedule. My friend Kate who works at the Wildlife Centre has told me they are in charge of organizing a marathon in Lilongwe in September. Can I do it? I’m not sure yet. Its tight on training considering I’m starting from pretty much scratch. I have to mentally commit. That is a difficult difficult thing to do. In Toronto, I had the Running Room – I miss my running friends and the motivation they gave me. You feel like you are in something together. Running alone is hard – especially long distances. When I was easily pounding out the kilometers at the Running Room in a group, even a measly 5km by myself could still be torturous. I also don’t want to fail at my first marathon attempt as I feel like that would fuel my running negative self-talk to a debilitating level. I’m not completely shutting out the possibility, but I’ve got to commit myself.

Despite the fact I JUST had a Lilongwe break I feel like I desperately need another one. Lilongwe can be extremely suffocating. I find myself and others tend to take on a ‘Oh, screw it’ attitude sometimes here. I am more than guilty. Today is not going the way I planned, ah screw it. In Malawi it is incredible how you can work all day, yet get nothing accomplished. I don’t even know what happened last week. Even my Canadian friends here has his facebook status today as “You know when you’re just like “F it?” Ya …. Looking forward to a distraction free week.” As an expat community, sometimes I think we all need to figure out a better way to deal with our stress. A few of my friends and I have been trying to channel our frustrations into working out/running . . . but like last week, I was inevitably bitten by the “screw it” bug. Kate and I started off this week with a 6:30am run this morning (beautiful temperature!) and have planned for another on Wednesday. Hopefully we will be able to keep positive spirits this week.

The title of my post I felt fitting. Mostly because I have revived my love affair with Sam Roberts (I miss Canadian music!) and I’ve been relating to all of his lyrics these days (“… cause there’s no road that ain’t a hard road to travel on …”). I feel like its been a long hard road to where I am now. I have a long hard road ahead. I’m watching a lot of my friends here battle the same things I have, and the same things I will. But as Sam would say “… stay true to your friends, cause they’ll save you in the end.” We’re all in this together guys.
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