Category: Running
Tuesday, Apr 14, 2015 | Backyard, Meditation, Readings, Running, Spring, Work |

My meditation guide invites me to enjoy sitting in silence for twenty minutes, taking these quiet moments for myself, to which I must reply: GAH! Yesterday, I meditated on the train home from a day-trip to Toronto, while just behind me a woman agreed compulsively with everything her friend said, even while her friend was in the midst of saying it: “yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes!” Today, I meditated in my office with the constant beep-beep and deep motorized rumble of trucks as Hydro employees work on the wires in front of our house, which has been a constant for at least a week. The dogs chimed in during the last five minutes of the meditation to howl at … well, whatever dogs howl at, and I think ours are particularly thick in their choices. Are you making good choices, dogs? Are you?
Am I making good choices?
Well, I keep meditating, despite the lack of silence, inner or outer. I think that’s a good choice. I’ve returned to a regular running schedule, despite some twinges in the hamstring. I think that could prove not to be a good choice, but I feel better about running than not running, and I’m making some gains in endurance and cardio again, so, hey, there’s probably a fifty-fifty chance that it’s not a bad choice.
Kevin chose to invest in some new soccer nets for our backyard. Really good choice. Fabulous choice! The kids have been outside non-stop, either on the trampoline or playing soccer in this happy spring weather we’ve been having. We may never be able to grow grass in that strip between nets, but I’m still thinking it’s a good choice.
I was also thinking, while looking out the train window yesterday, and watching the just-rained-upon farmland zoom past, that here in Canada we have such a low threshold for excitement about what constitutes spring. A bit of sun, a touch of warmth beneath a brisk breeze, and we’re all outside grinning and hi-fiving each other. Sure, the grass is brown, the ground is wet, the flowers have scarcely peeked through the mud, and all the trash left behind by melting snow banks is suddenly visible. Sure, it’s windy and rainy and when the sun goes behind a cloud it’s kind of chilly, in fact—but there’s light after supper, and the birds are noisy, and the kids are outside being noisy too, and we’re leaping and kicking our heels together for spring, spring, spring.
xo, Carrie
PS I successfully checked off from my list all of the work-related responsibilities for the past eight days. Book club; followed by ceremony for the winners of the KPL contest; followed by a reading in Ridgeway, Ontario (where the organizer, who also owns a lovely bookshop in Ridgeway, near Niagara Falls, let me come to her store after the reading to pick out books for each of my kids! isn’t that generous!?); followed by a meeting in Toronto yesterday; followed by an interview today. And now I’ve completed the public work for a little while and can dig back into the private, quiet, sitting-and-writing-all-day work. Oh, and the laundry. Light lifting. That’s the phrase that comes to mind. I don’t know why, but I’m glad. Maybe because it’s spring? All of this, despite the busyness and the effort, and the noise, has felt like light lifting. On we go.
Sunday, Jan 18, 2015 | Adventure, Exercise, Girl Runner, Readings, Running, Weekend, Word of the Year, Writing |

Sunday morning
Sunday morning. Family reading by the fire. The French horn being practiced, drowning out the radio. Smoothies and eggs for breakfast. I’m sitting in comfy pants at my desk looking at photos I took yesterday afternoon out in the wintry countryside, for my brother and sister, who are the band Kidstreet.

I got up early every morning this past week, but not on the weekend. I wrote every day.
I write during the day, but because my working hours are foreshortened due to children arriving home from school, or music lessons, I’m always looking for additional time slots, especially useful if I’m in the flow of a project; less useful if I’m trying to manufacture a scene or story from scratch. On Tuesday I took my laptop to gymnastics and wrote, and on Friday I took my laptop to soccer practice and wrote. I even took my laptop to piano lessons, and wrote, although that was more of a challenge, as I had bored children waiting on the bench beside me, angling for snacks and chat. I couldn’t use the ear plugs I usually do, while writing. (I even use ear plugs when I’m home alone with the dogs in the middle of the day; it’s a physical cue that helps me focus.)
On Friday, I had a fascinating correspondence with my Dutch translators, who sent over a series of questions about the nuances of words and phrases in Girl Runner.

The coming week will be different, as I’ve got three book club appearances on three consecutive evenings — two involve a meal in a restaurant for a book club called “An Appetite for Reading.” Will I be able to get up early every morning? I’m going to try. But no running. I was going to say, no running, sadly, but you know, I have to accept where my body is at, and be grateful that I’ve got options: spinning, yoga, swimming, walking, strength-training. I tried doing run/walk intervals this week, and the pain re-appeared immediately. It had been gone, even through heavy spinning and swimming, so it appears to be running-induced. Which means that for now, I’m a runner in spirit only … religiously doing my physio exercises and testing out running shoes on the treadmill, while walking and writing. (Ironically, I just got a new gig testing running shoes for a running magazine and boxes of shoes keep arriving at the door.)
And now, I think it’s time to write a poem, before another Sunday morning vanishes. Piano being practiced. Swim lesson prep has begun. Ear plugs in.
xo, Carrie
Sunday, Dec 7, 2014 | Dogs, Kids, Mothering, Parenting, Prizes, Running, Writing |

This happened on Friday (see above).
Friday was one of those days, which feels, at the moment, like all of the days, when every must-do is done slightly behind schedule, and therefore with ratcheting tension; that was Friday, especially so. Friday included an early-morning physio appointment, a work-related phone call wherein the phone wouldn’t work, marking assignments, work-related emails that couldn’t be ignored, taking care of the sick kid (who as of this writing is still sick!), and answering the door regarding incoming packages. It was the kind of day where I was reminded that working from home is convenient for everyone except for the person working from home. Need someone to sign for your package? Carrie’s home! Sick child needs attention, feeding, and care? Carrie’s home! The dogs are disastrous bundles of anxiety and need walking? Carrie’s home! I can hear the bitterness accumulating in my tone now. I guess I haven’t gotten it out of my system.
Not running right now (injury) isn’t helping. I’ve been walking on my treadmill regularly. Helps a bit. Doing my physio exercises faithfully. Hoping the exercises help the hamstring issue, because they ain’t helping with the excess of nervous energy.
Back to Friday. I was late heading out to pick up CJ. AppleApple had arrived home and wanted to come along and bring the dogs, who needed walking, as mentioned. Dogs proceeded to stop at several amazingly inconvenient locations and moments, en route, to relieve themselves, including once in the middle of a street (!!), which required some quick work with the plastic baggy. Anyway. We were late. I ended up leaving AppleApple in charge of the dogs near the school grounds, and running (remember how I’m not supposed to run?) all the way around the school in an effort to get to CJ before the bell rang. I was not successful. This was totally my fault for leaving so late plus bringing the dogs, mother-guilt, mother-guilt, mother-guilt, sprinting across the playground. There he was, panicking and near tears. Also, my hamstring hurt a lot, after just that short run. Which seems like not good news. But it felt like a day of not good news; or, more precisely, off-kilter news, not-quite-right news.

As we were walking around the school to reunite with AppleApple and dogs, CJ smiled at me, having already cheered up, and I said, “Oh, and look, you’ve had a big day! You’ve lost your tooth!”
His face simply fell. “What????” He reached into his mouth to feel for the tooth.
“Did you not know you’d lost your tooth?”
“No!” He was near-tears again. The tooth had been dangling by a thread when he left in the morning. I’d offered to pull it, but he was hesitant and Kevin was in a hurry, and so we didn’t try. And now the tooth was gone, lost for real. First baby tooth of my last baby. The Tooth Fairy in me was grieving. And CJ was really worried about the Tooth Fairy too. Would she deliver without the goods?
“I think I swallowed it,” he said solemnly. “But not when I was eating my apple. I didn’t have an apple today!”
Later that evening, we problem-solved. CJ composed a note. It went something like this: “Dear Tooth Fairy, I lost my tooth. I can’t find my tooth. Next time I will let my mom pull my tooth. I hope you find it. Love, CJ.” [Note: certain portions of this letter may have been dictated by a certain mother…]
In the morning, he came running find me, clutching the note, on which the Tooth Fairy had made her reply. “Mom, the Tooth Fairy really is magical!!!!” [Note: the Tooth Fairy focused her message on brushing. Certain portions her letter may have been dictated by a certain father, who is in charge of the dental portfolio, in our family…]

On another subject, sort of, I’m wondering how much longer to sustain the Santa Claus myth for my Fooey, who, at age 9, is seriously suspicious: “When I move out of this house, you’ll have to tell me if Santa Claus is real!” Um. Okay. I don’t even particularly like carrying out these illusions, a part of me feels deceptive, but the other part knows that the kids love and even crave the illusions; my older two were crushed when, as a novice parent wanting to be honest, I told them the truth about Santa Claus, when they asked me, around the ages of 3 and 4. Crushed! They reminisce about it to this day (not around the younger kids, however). “Oh, Mom, you just didn’t know any better,” they say, rather fondly. They’ve forgiven me. But they’re careful to make sure I keep things going for the younger two. In fact, it was AppleApple who stepped in and took charge when Fooey demanded to know why the pyjamas from Santa Claus always come from Land’s End…

This post has gone in a direction entirely unforeseen. From griping about working at home to the realities of the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. How can I be a fiction writer and be so ambivalent about sustaining illusions? Honestly.
xo, Carrie
PS This Obscure CanLit blog has been shortlisted for two prizes at the Canadian WeBlog Awards, in the categories of Life and Writing & Literature. I’ll admit to being slightly baffled about this, but nevertheless pleased and flattered.
Friday, Nov 14, 2014 | Exercise, Fun, Running, Work, Writing |

Ta-da! This is the cover as it will appear in the UK & Australia, available February, 2015.
I’ve given myself a crash course in discipline this week. After all those late nights, and hospitality suites, and complementary drinks, and absence of regular meals, I needed to believe that I still possessed both will and discipline.
I’m vaguely recalling that my intention for the fall festival tour was to have fun.
So good job. Mission accomplished. Not that hard to achieve after all, frankly, when dispossessed of the ordinary responsibilities of one’s regular day to day life. Even just not having to do laundry for six people: instant party atmosphere.
Now I’m back to the day to day—mostly. And I decided that the situation demanded a shock to the system, like being tossed into the deep end and told to swim, and then by necessity remembering how. So I set my alarm early every morning this week. I got up early every morning this week (except for today; apparently, by Friday, I’m toast and require more than 5 hours of sleep, especially after driving to and from Hamilton yesterday for an evening reading). On Monday I did weights, on Tuesday and Thursday I ran with friends, outside, in the dark, no matter the cold, and on Wednesday I ran with my own Girl Runner at the indoor track. She found this to be an exhilarating experience as we zipped around and around past the early morning walkers and joggers like we were wearing superhero capes. “Don’t you just feel like doing interval sprints?” she asked me after we’d done our first lap. “No, I’m not getting that same feeling,” I replied. But of course her eagerness for a challenge won out. I couldn’t let her sprint alone. I had to give chase. It was fun.
Now, afterward. Afterward I could barely walk. It doesn’t seem either possible or fair, to feel so out of shape after such a brief interlude of fun-having, but there it is. My grey hairs are showing.
I do have more grey hairs, or white hairs, more precisely, than I did a month ago. I’m not making that up.
I turn forty in a little over a month. I don’t always feel like the young one anymore. I’ve decided this is a good thing, mostly. I just have to get used to being expected to know things. Actually, I like that part of it. I could get used to that.
Back to the crash course in discipline—which includes setting timers on the writing of these posts. This blog is where I come to have fun. This is my own personal hospitality suite. And the timer just went, right when the post was going off the rails a bit. Okay, reel it in. Stop bantering idly on about aging and the happy faking of wisdom. There are other projects on which I must lavish my allotment of work-time.
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Oct 7, 2014 | Big Thoughts, Fall, Money, Running, Work, Writing |

A friend said to me this morning, as we were running together in the damp, dark pre-dawn, This book is not your whole identity, you know. You are much more than this book.
I needed to hear that. Thanks, friend.
I hadn’t recognized, quite, how Girl Runner has subsumed not just my hours, my focus, my working life right now, but also my identity. I am wearing, almost as a costume, almost full-time, the cloak of person-who-wrote-Girl-Runner. It’s not an invisibility cloak; it might be the opposite, a visibility cloak. But what’s visible is author-of-Girl-Runner, and invisible is everything else. Which is why completing that race felt so very good, perhaps.
My professional life is caught up in this identity: I would not be a teacher or a guest speaker if I were not, first and foremost, the author of Girl Runner. If I shrugged off that visibility cloak, an enormous section of my money-earning life would vanish in a poof of dust.
So it’s scary, I guess, to imagine not pouring my all into inhabiting my writer self. Carrie who writes books earns a living, whether by writing books or by spinning off the writing of books into related enterprises. Earning a living has long been my goal. It’s a worthy goal, I believe.
But maybe that goal feels a little one-dimensional as I pursue it with greater success and therefore greater effort, greater demands on my time. And on my identity.
If the writer cloak were balled up and chucked into a dusty corner, or even just hung up in a closet for awhile, what identity would emerge? Would I be fearful and lost? Free-roaming? Empty? Or would I find friend, mother, baker, caregiver rising up to fill the space? Or something else I can’t guess or imagine? But I can’t imagine it, because in truth being a writer isn’t a cloak, it’s more like tough thread woven right through the skin.

Yet I sense that other parts of me are being shadowed, right now. It’s like I planted a seed that’s grown, quite suddenly, to become a tall leafy tree, shading out all else. It’s like I’ve become that tree. But I’m not. The tree is of me, but separate from me. Can I climb its branches and catch some light? Should I wait patiently for the season to change, the leaves to fall, to crunch around in them, to see them turn to compost, wait for other seeds to grow, a forested tangle of identity, creeping on the ground and digging in roots and reaching for the sky? Can I be many different parts all at once, or can I only do/be one thing at a time fruitfully, fully, well?
xo, Carrie
Sunday, Oct 5, 2014 | Adventure, Big Thoughts, Friends, Fun, Running, Spirit |
A race is a very special undertaking. For some reason that can’t possibly relate to logic or reason, I’ve chosen to run two in the past three weeks.
It might not be good for my body to run a race every day.
But maybe it would be better for my mind and my spirit to run a race every day.
I did not feel like running this race. I wasn’t even sure my training was sufficient, despite some hard work over the summer. As predicted, my ability to train on the weekends dropped off as soon as September arrived, and with it the book. I ran that half-marathon three weeks ago as a training run. Because otherwise, I’d dropped down to three runs a week, none of them over 12.5 kilometres. Yesterday’s race was double that at 25 kilometres, and on steep winding trails, very hilly, while the half-marathon route had been a gently rolling road with no real hill challenges.
But I went. I set my alarm for early, slept poorly, woke and forced myself to eat and to drink and to prepare, and drove to Pinehurst Conservation area, and picked up my race kit, and stood in line at the bathrooms, and sat in the truck trying to stay warm and eating almonds and reading toward the ending of A Tale for the Time Being and then it was time to lace up my shoes, pin on my number, and go to the start line. And then it was time to run.
So I ran.
I didn’t know whether or not I was up for this particular challenge. In fact, I feared that I was not up for it; certainly knew that I would not be choosing to do it, had I not signed up months ago. But that’s a good enough reason to do something, I believe: sign up, show up, offer what you have in you to offer on the day it is required of you.
It might not be as much as you could offer under ideal circumstances, or at a different time in your life. That is okay.
A race is more about marking the moment with the offering of your effort than it is about finishing or competing or putting up race times. In fact, that last one is just a number and is worth something to you alone, and you get decide, therefore, its value.
I decided yesterday that the numbers didn’t matter.
I ran without a watch. I ran on gut instinct, following my body’s ebbs and flows of energy, without judging or critiquing my body’s efforts, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but then stronger again, always with a mind to the effort needed and the desire and pleasure of speed and forward-motion. On some of the downhills, it felt like I was flying. On some of the uphills, I was bent double and slowed to a walking pace. I tuned a lot out. In fact, the experience had an otherworldly quality, or the quality of a dream I did not control, but only moved through.
For long stretches, I thought of nothing, saw little, only was aware of motion itself, the path immediately ahead, the tree roots, the leaves, the colours, the sticks and stones under my feet. I remember the sun shone for awhile, its brightness on the fallen, wet poplar leaves so strong that it hurt my eyes to focus on the ground and yet I knew that I needed to focus lest I lose my footing or trip. So much of my mind’s work went into the path immediately ahead.
When my energy flagged, I practiced staying in the moment. I thought of old Jiko in A Tale for the Time Being practicing zazen (though this was moving meditation). I used a few mantras, chosen at random from the flotsam and jetsam of information that had passed through my mind either right before race time or during the race itself.
A phrase on the back of a t-shirt that I saw while waiting in line in the women’s bathroom: “The mind leads the body.” For a while, I was saying it backward: “The body follows the mind,” which worked too, but then I ran behind the woman with the t-shirt for a stretch and saw the words as they were, so I switched to that. I tried to thank her when I passed her, but instead said, “I like your shirt.” Which wasn’t quite the right message, but there was very little oxygen available for communication.
Communication was rudimentary. I felt myself pulled deep inside my body, my eyes tools only, unable or unwilling to connect, almost a blank of observable emotion.
The flying mantra came from a comment posted on Facebook by a friend in Ottawa, encouraging my race effort: she said the damp would keep me cool and I would feel like I was flying. And I did, sometimes.
There was one more mantra, from Elizabeth Gilbert, the author, who I follow on Facebook, who said that your fear is the most boring thing about you. So, whenever I felt the trickle of fear approaching, or questioned whether I was running too well, too easily, too strong, and would therefore shortly most definitely crash, I told myself: your fear is the most boring thing about you!
I knew the second lap would be difficult, and was not prepared for it to be as manageable as it became. I’d lost all fear by that point, and the kilometres seemed to melt rather than be counted, as I wasn’t paying much attention, and would miss kilometre markers altogether, so it seemed like before I knew it there were only 5 kilometres left.
I drank coke and water. I sucked on an energy gel pack that my friend Heather, who I run with on Thursday mornings, had given me along with a new pair of socks as a surprise gift for race day. I wore the socks, too. I thought of Heather during that last 10 kilometres because we run that distance together and we run it far faster than I’m used to covering 10 kilometres, so I told myself that if I could keep up with Heather, I could easily complete these last 10 kilometres. In fact, when I realized I had only five kilometres left, it seemed as if the race had happened too quickly.
Not that I wanted it to go on longer.
Just that I was shocked to realize how quickly the time had passed, how deeply inside of it my focus was and would remain, with little ticks and breaks here and there, until I crossed the finish line.
In fact, I sped up significantly when I realized I was completing the last kilometre, and sprinted the last 600 metres, passing many runners, none of them choosing to challenge me, although I kept listening for the sound of footfalls chasing behind me. None came. I knew I could carry myself over the last stretch, and the sprint felt easy at the end, strong.
I don’t know what time I got. I was too totally inside the focus to look at the clock as I crossed the line. I do know it was faster than I’d hoped for, but slower than previous races.
As I drove home, it came to me that a race is an opportunity to prove to yourself that you’re stronger than you think. That’s what it felt like. During the race, I felt so much stronger than I’d thought I was, only hours earlier, so much braver, so much calmer. I’m doing this, I told myself; you’re doing this. It was exhilarating and fun and joyful. I will do it again. I will approach it with the same spirit, with optimism, with training to underpin the approaching effort, and without giving in to fear. It isn’t that the fears won’t rise, but I don’t have to bend to them.
This is life, too.
For example, I can’t not write another book for fear that it won’t match my previous books. I can’t let fear guide my choices or shape my decisions. I need to show up for the challenge, whatever that challenge may be, with the best effort I can offer, right now. I’m stronger than I think; you’re stronger than you think.
xo, Carrie