I’m on week one, day four of my training schedule. It’s my only day of rest. I don’t want to rest; I want to run, even though it’s 9 degrees outside. But I will rest because I know that my body, especially my right knee, the one that periodically gives me trouble and has a bone spur, needs it.
Not wanting to rest makes me think of an unpublished blog post that I recently found:
Restlessness
According to my mom, when I was a kid, I hated going to sleep. I wanted to be up all of the time, active, doing things. She claimed that, on more than one occasion, I fell asleep in a running position. Now I’m middle-aged and I don’t have trouble falling asleep, but I’m still restless and I end up waking up a lot. Restless. Legs that ache with a desire to move, to go. Somewhere. I don’t have wanderlust, just a need to move. I feel trapped in the bed, just sitting there, immobile. I used to think that my restlessness was because I was no longer as active as I used to be. Around the time I became an academic and my mom started to slowly die, I stopped exercising my body. All of my energy was used to think as an academic and to survive raising two young kids while witnessing my mom dying. But now, I’m exercising. I’ve been running for many years and swimming and biking. I work out a lot. But it hasn’t stopped my restlessness. Sometimes I feel like a caged animal, pacing around. I remember witnessing my mom do the same thing. We would be watching tv, maybe a movie, and all of a sudden, she would get up and just start walking around the room. I do that now.
Where does this restlessness come from and what do I do with it?