Time To Go Home

My half marathon is in six days. This may come as a surprise, but I am 110% excited for it. Although I've always been athletic, I've never trained this consistently for anything in my life. When I say consistently, I mean running has been about 1/3 of my life the past three months, the other 2/3 being school and eating.

Seriously, though, running is a part of me. I'm not the fastest, and I can't go the farthest, but I get into a rhythm and it's my way of coping with life. My inner dialogue is quieted. My raging mind is stilled. I dig deep down and find my heartbeat again. It was there all along, of course, but in the second mile it makes its presence known. When I can start hearing it in my ears, other sounds are less important. For an hour or two, it's just my heart, my lungs, and the ground.

I read somewhere the average person will applaud your running accomplishments up to around four miles. If you run farther than that, you get "the stare." I think this is generally true, which is why as I type this I am imagining all of your faces with blank stares on them, your heads cocked to one side, wondering if you should skip this post. 

But I write because it is tapering week, and I must express my frustration. I'm cutting my runs in half this week leading up to the race, and it's messing with my head. I feel pretty lazy. And bored, already. Stress fracture deja vu.

If I handle life a little worse than normal this week, forgive me. I blame tapering.

In other news, I am happy to announce I will be going back to Russia this summer. I'm joining the Family Camp team for the ten day trip in July. It's weird to think about Russia, though, because last summer seems like so many decades ago. A lot has happened to me and in me the past 10 months. I don't feel connected to my Russian self, to my passion for the Caucuses, to my dear family there. I rarely think in Russian, speak in Russian, or talk about those couple times I actually lived there.

If I didn't know better I would say Russia was a lifetime ago, a faint black and white photograph on the back wall of my memory.

But we have begun trip planning as a team, and things are stirring in me.

When I turn off the lights at night and crawl into bed, I hear Nadya's voice in my head. She says my name. She always says my name before she tells me something important, and everything Nadya says is important.

"Джордан."

"Да?"

"Скажий мне о вашей церкви."

Jordan, tell me about your church, she says. And then she asks about America. And she asks if I will please peel the potatoes, or make the salad.

And some nights I see us walking to the track to ride bikes with the kids, tending to scraped knees and breaking up brother-fights. I think about the times when I would stay at Slavik and Tanya's until late, and Sasha would come looking for me. "Dad's here for you," they would tell me. I smell the tea and soup. I hold babies and laugh from my belly. I feel the mountain sun and pick the mountain flowers.

It's at night in the dark that my mind reminds me of it all. And it tells me its time to go home.