Letting it go

I started this blog in 2007 and my last post is from spring 2018. I have come back here often since then, trying to figure it out. There are so many draft posts where I tried to tie the events of my life since that time to my present.

But I have come to see that that is not going to be possible. There is no neat line between where I was then and where I am now and that is okay. In brief – since that post my life changed radically. In the late summer of 2018 I separated from my husband, moved to London and started work full-time. The circumstances of how that all came to unfold are too private for me to share here and affect the people I love too much for me to go into but suffice it to say the past 2 and a half years have been a time of reflection, reckoning and change. And yes, then there was a pandemic too.

And my running? Well – it was there. I have never stopped running. In late 2019 I even ran a race, an odd, badly organised but fun 20 miler that reminded me how much I love racing. But my relationship with it changed, and with that my feelings about this blog.

Running, being a runner, was a huge part of my identity. As was being a marathoner, an endurance athlete. For a while there, it was even what I did for a living. And when I moved to London and started working, I was known as a runner at work and by my friends. During that time of massive upheaval, when I really struggled to figure out who I was when everything in my life had been upended, I clung onto being a runner like Leo clung onto the raft. But I also struggled with it. I didn’t train for races. I didn’t run on a fixed schedule anymore. And I felt a tremendous amount of failure about the fact that I was not “running through it”. That the adversity in my life did not, like it does in the movies, result in me getting up in the dark and turning into a lean mean running machine. But instead that sometimes I ran far, sometimes I didn’t run, sometimes I ran fast, sometimes I ran slow. I ran how I felt. All over the place, really. And I couldn’t find a way of writing about that on here in a way that made sense to me. I couldn’t find a way of wrapping my life, as it really was, in any kind of neat container.

But I have come to see that that is, in fact, the truth. That there is no neat container. Life has turned out different, more complex, much more jagged, but also richer, better, happier and more truthful than I had thought. So much less fixed than I thought it was and that is a source of excitement and joy for me.

I miss things about this blog. I miss the community it gave me, the real and lifelong friends it gave me and the practise of writing that it allowed me. Which is why I hung onto it for so long and tried to figure out a way forward with it.

But I am going to let this blog go now. Without necessarily knowing what’s next. I have created a sub stack account and I will start writing a newsletter soon. I have no idea what will be in it – but if you want to read it, sign up here.

In the meantime, this blog will stay here till WordPress gives up the ghost. Thank you for reading, for commenting and for following for SO many years. Hoping to see and read you in the future.

Summer 2020

Love, Petra