Bits and pieces

You know when everything suddenly falls into place? This week I've been considering various options of things to do for my 30th next year. I wanted to go on some sort of activity holiday, as I'm now more confident of joining up with a group of other, likeminded, people, sharing a room with a stranger etc. I've been rummaging around in cyberspace and had come up with various options.

Meanwhile, emails have been flying backwards and forwards about Stockholm, which might be Matt's next marathon if he decides to do another one. I'd said that I'd do it without checking the date. Today I looked on the internet, and bingo. 2pm on my birthday. What could be a better way to spend it than running a marathon with Matt and the (majority of the) New York team?

The worrying thing is that, having got the idea into my head that running a marathon would be a nice way to spend the day, I'm now tempted to sign up for the race anyway, even if Matt and the team don't want to do it. Those voices in my head are starting again, and they usually win.

Stockholm is a lovely city, after all...

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Meanwhile, it seems that fate has dealt my grandmother a cruel hand at the moment. It turns out that the confusion and madness is essentially an age related, degenerative thing, and that it would have happened anyway regardless of the cancer. It just happens to have manifested itself now, which is extraordinarily bad timing.

The question is where do we go from here? My mother and sister feel strongly that my granddad can't cope with having her at home, but she is desperate to get out of hospital. Would a care home be any better, or would it be even worse? Does it depend on how long the cancer is likely to give her (which is a question that the doctor treating her at the moment just can't answer)?

You can see my grandfather's heart slowly breaking into little pieces. He spent the weekend in tears, and showed far more affection and emotion in public in the course of a short visit to the hospital than I've ever seen him display. I don't know how he will live without her, but I'm not sure he's strong enough to live with her either.

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And finally, as this started off as a weight loss blog, I have a confession. My clothes are tight, and I'm about half a stone (7lb) up on where I was a couple of months ago. That's no surprise really, my exercise has gone down during a month of tapering and recovering, I've been comfort eating, and I indulged quite a bit in New York and Amsterdam. I haven't been able to get into a routine, I have been away at weekends when I would usually cook up batches of healthy stuff, and my ability to get to the supermarket to get fresh fruit and veg seems to have been very restricted.

I've done better than I might have done in the circumstances. I've been eating rubbish by my standards, but it's a long way from takeaway pizzas and McDonalds. I haven't dived into 200g bars of chocolate washed down with a bottle of wine. Tinned fruit in syrup isn't as good as fresh fruit, but it's better than a slice of cheesecake. But even so, my diet could be a lot better than it has been, and it's time to take control of the situation.

Equally, I'm still a size 12 and a stone below the top of my healthy BMI range. But that doesn't mean that I feel good at this weight. It's funny, a couple of months ago I was worrying that I was getting too thin, but now I've put a bit of weight on, I'm feeling that I want to take it off again. I suppose it's all part of the process of finding a comfortable weight - I haven't really had any regain before so haven't been through that process of working out where I start to feel too heavy.

It's not exactly rocket science. On mara training mileage I could have multiple treats in one day. Now I need to remember that just because my brain is used to eating them, it doesn't mean that I need them, and I have to *gasp* choose between them depending on my hunger rather than eating them all. If I bring food into work and I'm not hungry I need to remind myself that there's no obligation on me to eat all of it.

I will get control of this before it gets out of hand.