Training Through Grief
T-minus 1-week before summer marathon training kicks off. I anticipated the giddy feeling from my filled calendar of workouts, new chaotic morning routines, and folding my practices into lessons for my young kiddos, who are watching my every move.
What I did not anticipate was losing my best friend. For over 13 years, it was her and I. A chocolate lab named Moose. She was the catalyst who made me stick with running for her sanity and my own in our early days together. My breakfast, lunch, and dinner date, my little spoon (and sometimes big spoon), a soulmate that I laughed at movies with while she was tucked in my knee nook and let me hold her as tight as I could while I cried to over things I wouldn’t dare to spill on anyone else in my life. It was her and I from the get-go. She was the witness to my life. To this day, I only have a handful of friends - real friends, because I never had to go through that early 20’s phase of trying to please people, I was happy to head home and hang out with her. She went through college with me, house parties, overnight study binges, bar hopping, graduations, first dates, road trips, mountain adventures, proposals, weddings, multiple moves across the U.S., miscarriage breakdowns, pregnancy celebrations, and arrivals of a few babies. She wasn’t just a dog who was “there,” she was right next to me. We were in it together.
It’s hard to put in words how much she means to me. I have no idea how to put it into words because I have no idea what this feeling is. Other than pure loneliness. It’s having to be the one to make the call to ease her pain for the last time. It’s holding my head to hers for the last time as we went through that last step together. It’s sleeping with her ashes quietly sobbing because her snoring used to be the sound I went to sleep to.
My heart is just broken. Its that simple but the most complicated thing I’ve ever felt.
I started this blog as a landing place for my wellness, for accountability, to be vulnerable with other runners who are also dealing with life. Running isn’t everything - running is there to hold your hand through life. To keep you moving forward. And now, I’m hoping that running will give me time to be in my head with Moose and work through these feelings that no one else can seem to provide comfort.
Even if these words just go into the void with no one to ever read them - she was here, she mattered, and she changed my life. And in this form, she’ll still be my running partner.
