"I Would Send You a Bouquet of Sharpened Pencils"

Welcome back to my Midtown Holding Pattern reality. The doldrums of summer at the office are over, the bosses are back, and I’m wearing mascara. Labor Day is like the inverse relation of Memorial Day where x equals fun. (See? I’m totally ready for the GRE.)

The end of summer is always so bittersweet. Despite being out of college for over a year now, I can’t resist feeling nostalgic for the Back-to-School jitters. I’m excited for new classes that I’m not in, and new people that I won’t meet and new clothes that I’ll buy anyway because I’ve never met a J.Crew catalog I could refuse. Maybe this is the dissonance throwing my body off-kilter. Can I blame the nagging pain in my right leg on another autumn without school?

Of course it happens when I finally feel faster, when I start to see the rewards that come from paying my dues for a full year. Is this how the rest of my running life will go? Start from scratch, train hard and then harder, get better, get hurt, repeat? Every time it happens I try to convince myself that maybe I’m not really JackieOh, Runner. Maybe I’m JackieOh, Cyclist or JackieOh, C-Cup, or worse: JackieOh, Fat Girl. Somehow, because I’m too slow I guess, running catches up to me every time and I take it back all over again. Running is the abusive boyfriend that I can’t leave. You just don’t know him like I do – he’s really sweet to me when we’re alone. Oh that injury? It’s nothing, I mean, I bumped into a chair. I’m fine.

Oh, but I’m not fine and for me to admit defeat and make a doctor’s appointment means that my leg is about ready to stage a bloody coup d’etat from the rest of my body. I may have passed the point where a normal person would have stopped running about a week and a half ago. You can’t really blame me for disliking my orthopedist though – every time I go it’s the same diagnosis: NO RUNNING.

In my preparation for the NO RUNNING death sentence, I’ve vowed to eat a bit healthier and cut down on some of my carbohydrate consumption. MomOh jokingly calls my eating habits the North Beach diet - all carbs. I will NOT be JackieOh, Fat Girl. So here is my restricted list, written on a Post-It note and stuck to my computer monitor:

!!!! NO !!!!

Bagels
Muffins
Pastries
Cookies
Cake
Ice Cream
Soda

I’ll probably add to the list as I think of more indulgences, but those are my heavy-hitting gluttony favorites. My first draft included beer, but that was a bit ambitious. I figure I’ll keep beer in my diet but make more of an effort to drink more hard liquor instead! On an empty stomach! Woo hoo, drunk quicker!

Maybe this fall won’t be so bad after all.