One of the few skill sets I have been able to consistently demonstrate over the years is my ability to pack. I’m not sure if as a child I excelled at fitting plastic shapes into their holes; perhaps I had the ability to force square pegs into round holes and just as importantly extract them with little to no damage. That’s a question I need to ask my Mom at some stage.
But I do know that when it comes to getting suitcases into trunks, I’d stack my abilities up against all comers. Sure, sure. On any given day I might not emerge the packing champ, but I certainly would acquit myself with honor. If a trunk is a blank Tetris field, I can wiggle, rotate, and shift pieces with the best of them. Or so I like to believe.
I want to say this extends to the logistical planning on the calendar. I’ve gotten proficient at flying in and out of locales for races and/or events on consecutive days or weeks. Multi-city routings are the norm rather than the exception for me these days. A color coded excel spreadsheet helps me in my planning as I block out weekends or months with prebooked adventures. Travel typically is driven by marathons more often than not.
And yet, I find myself struggling with some details at the moment. Rental cars, hotels, airfare. It’s all gotten to be a bit of a jumble. And while I have in the past tried to finalize itinerary details for each race before booking items on another trip, I’ve been more chaotically booking elements and pieces of late. There’s a hotel for this trip but no flight yet; a rental car but no place to stay. Flights but nothing else. And some flights have been booked that when viewed at the macro level have me bouncing back and forth in opposite directions from where I need to be later in the week.
Complicating matters further is the notion that I’ve been planning so far in advance that most weekends are already spoken for. Friends and family have given up trying to suggest meeting up for things as they assume (and usually quite rightly) that I already have a marathon scheduled for that week. Some spontaneity of last-minute fun is sacrificed in the name of assured pre-planned fun.
My point is, I may need to start looking at a bit more fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants (or I should say run-by-the-seat-of-my-pants) planning and just letting things happen. Just like in Tetris, you can’t know what piece may be coming down the proverbial pike five or six moves from now. Maybe it’s an L-shaped week which has me wrapping up a race and the spending some time with friends and family for a few days afterwards. Maybe it’s a square date, or a four-day length. Or maybe it’s one of those squat T-shaped ones that has me starting one place, driving all over, and then flying out later.
So fingers crossed — maybe my chaotic partial planning is a good thing and not merely laziness.
Rationalization is a powerful tool.
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Post Script: I had originally written an entirely different post at 34,000 feet this morning on my Southwest flight from Orlando to Los Angeles. It turned out to be a pathetic wallow in self-pity. Sometimes you need to just vent that stuff out, even if it’s not entirely accurate. Melancholy and wallowing have a tendency to heighten the silly drama and paint a decidedly warped and biased picture that is often unhelpful as anything more than a release valve. That said, there have been moments in running where something similar happens inside my head and throughout my body. I guess it’s what other runners deem “hitting the wall,” something I’ve never quite wrapped my head around for explanation. Some day maybe I’ll use the “Deleted Scene” posting that I’d like to just trash immediately. It might work in excerpt form as a representation of those times when one does “hit a wall” and just emotionally, psychologically, physically, mentally and all things -ly break down. For me it might best represent that moment when you “hit the wall” and “the wall” hits back, then “the wall” collapses onto you and smothers you in the debris (or if you’re from Jersey or me in the Eighth Grade, it smothers you in “de breeze”).
Anyhoo, that’s enough ranting and raving. Here’s a pic of me on my shakeout run this afternoon, post arrival back in La-La Land. I ran to Catalina… not the island, mind you. Just the road. But still — I ran to Catalina!
