This morning it was storming like somebody had better be building an arc. I think it was around 2:00 a.m. when I heard the thunder, and had a hard time getting back to sleep after that - not because it was such a torrential storm, but because it was the same kind of morning as that first one; the cold thunderstorm cutting through warm air, and lying there wide awake - again - I thought to myself, ...my first race of the season is in two weeks, and it's Wildflower. Heh...unbelievable.

A little background though...

That first early morning three years ago, when I decided I seriously needed to make a change in my life, I got up and gathered all my unread, rain soaked fashion magazines and put them in a pile next to the trash. I was 183 lbs (and after Ironman Wisconsin this year I'll post the only picture in existence of me at that weight), but that wasn't what was weighing me down. The weight was just a byproduct of a much bigger, more depressing problem, which I couldn't figure out because everything was really fine, everyone in my life was happy, and I had everything I could have ever wanted. But looking back, I had everything except "me."

Instead of accepting myself as I was, I obsessed about being some idealized cover model 'other'; needing to meet impossible standards in order to feel satisfied. Problem was, however, that with each new purchase of an airbrushed copy of Glamor or Vogue, I was just spinning my wheels and digging myself more deeply into a rut of disappointment. Then, for some reason on that much too early morning, I realized I had to adjust my way of thinking because people can never really be happy with anything unless they're first happy with themselves.

Even though I knew this, something inside me was still too stubborn to dismiss the idea of striving to meet impossible standards altogether, it's all I really knew, after all. So with that, the next day I signed up for a marathon, having not run a whole mile since they made me do it in high school gym class - now that definitely sounded pretty impossible to me at the time. A few weeks later I also signed up for a half-Ironman, not even able to swim with my face in the water, and the rest is, well, 'finding my way' as chronicled in archives on my blog.

Just like that first early morning three years ago, I woke up today to crashing thunder, but instead of weighing 183 lbs I weigh 143. Instead of stacks of soaked and spine-barely-broken fashion magazines, I have stacks of dog-eared, well-worn endurance sports and writing magazines. And instead of not having run a mile in over a decade, I've run (and swum!) more miles in one day than I ever had in two decades combined.

Heh...unbelievable.

I thought this morning, as I listened to the rain pummel my window a few minutes more, about how far I've come since that all-too-familiar rainy morning three years ago. I thought about how I've evolved from insecure and overcompensatingly cocky to satisfied, confident and happy, and how the trip hasn't been easy on anyone in my life. But I guess for some of us, sometimes, we get swept up and carried away when we try to let go of what's weighing us down. And sometimes maybe it just has to be this way, if only to give us an aerial view of the big picture, and a new perspective on everything when we finally land.