I originally started this post in mid-December. Fitting or ironic that a post on sustaining and finishing things has lingered in draft form all these many weeks.

So I ran a marathon a few weeks ago. Yeah, I finished and it’s great to be back at it after a decade of not racing, even with 15 miles in a downpour with headwinds. But I haven’t run since. Sure, I had plans of easy recovery runs a few days after the race, alas, I chose lounging in bed with the dogs and my iPhone each at 6:30 a.m.

I noticed the same thing during my training. Leading up to our trip to Iceland in October, I was running four times a week. I barely missed any workouts. I even ran before we caught a cab to the airport at 8:00 a.m. and on the first morning that we work up in Reykjavik. Then, because it was too cold or I told myself it was supposed to be vacation, I took a few days off. Which eventually became three weeks off. The fact that they were the three most important weeks of high-volume and the longest long runs would eventually show itself during the race.

And it’s not just limited to physical activity. I can get on a roll with knitting, plowing through inches of a project for weeks at a time. I finished a lopapeysa for Chris a few nights ago (after a month-long sprint), but the armpits still need to be grafted shut and some ends that need to be woven in. I haven’t touched it since I bound off the last stitch. Instead, it joins a mega-fringed lopapeysa, a outerwear coat and a cowl-neck pullover, all of which need buttons, pockets and flaps attached, or a single seam sewn. Basically, by the end of this weekend, I could have four new garments (technically three, but I plan on borrowing Chris’). In the sock department… well, let’s not even go there.

According to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, if an object experiences no net force, then its velocity is constant. More often described as intertia, this is the concept that an object in motion tends to stay in motion or an object at rest remains so unless an outside force acts on it. My question is, what is the force that’s changing me?

It could be the motivation that was sufficient to start a project or compels me to run is not sufficient or even related to what’s necessary to sustain it. The “getting over the hump” carries me pretty far down the path, but that desire is sated before the end goal is achieved.

Self-pity aside, much of this post’s whining is irrelevant now, as evidenced by the picture above of the aforementioned fringed monster of ends to be woven in. C’s sweater is also complete, however the other two remain. I did finish a pair of mitten-capped fingerless gloves started during my first year of knitting before the end of 2012. So I’m feeling slightly more bad-ass in the completion department.

And, for the time being, I’m a week back on the running wagon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 at 9:55 am and is filed under knitting, life, whining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.