These last few days have been full of mental health mess! Periodic depression and anxiety are hanging out with wedding planning and work stress and no one is having a good time over here. I went dress hunting over the weekend (really fun, thanks to my friend who went above and beyond to be sure I had a nice day) and now I’m managing the fallout from my mother who wanted me to travel 600+ miles so I could do the dress shopping with her instead. Ain’t no one got time for that, mom.
Anyway, I tried to channel all that into my run today– and for once, I think it worked! 3 miles on my monotonic up/down route took 35:32, and I’m quite pleased about that, a pace <12:00/mi out in the real world makes me feel like I’m improving a little. I have about 3 weeks to go before the 5k.
I had some kind of music malfunction during the run, though. I was running the Nike+ app to track with a Zombies, Run! supply mission going in the background, so I set Nike+ to go without music– but at some point it decided to play… Philip Glass? It was pretty creepy to be out running around and the Music Box theme from Candyman comes on over my headphones…
Running While Fat 
That’s nice your friend has made this sort of thing fun!
My mother was VERY uninvolved in my wedding and the last thing she would have offered is to go dress shopping. Kinda surprised she even came to the wedding. Close, we’re not. Even so, I feel you :-) 600 miles for clothes shopping, nope.
Hrodebert and I made a pact, and I’ll bet you and your partner have similar frame of mind even if not explicitly stated – anything wedding-related that caused angst got tossed. Not worth the fuss. It helped that neither of us was particularly wedding-minded and didn’t have a Dream Wedding in mind; the details weren’t all that important. We wanted to have a nice ceremony and celebration to mark the event, but weren’t set on any specific customs. One of the few things we really cared about was playing “our song” at the reception, and the DJ forgot to bring the album! It still worked out okay…
She’s great! Honestly, I don’t know how I managed to find a friend as awesome as her :)
I like your pact idea! It’s difficult since the wedding is in my ancestral homeland so my mom’s taking care of a lot of things… which is a blessing and a curse. Blessing because I don’t have to do it, but curse because she and I have vastly different ideas about how things “should” be. I’m trying not to stress about that; the things she comes up with are nice too, just a lot more complicated work than I’d do.
What was your song? My partner and I don’t really have one, and we’re trying to figure out the whole first dance thing. (A tradition I’d jettison entirely… if my dad hadn’t already said he’d picked out a song.)
Well… this might be sort of embarrassing, but our song is “1865” (aka “96º In The Shade”) by Third World. Although it’s a beautiful song, it’s not romantic at all – quite the opposite. But it was the song that was playing the moment we fell in love.
Running my feels is totally why I run! That and I’m now a bit addicted, but seriously, it’s one of my best mental health tools!
Just remember, your wedding is your (and your spouse-tobe’s) day. As hard as it can be, ignore the criticisms when people try to make your day about them. Weddings can bring out the crazy in others for some reason, but after any drama, you’ll still be married, and that’s the important thing to remember.
Some days it works to help mood, and some days it doesn’t, but either way you get a run in so it’s not a bad thing :)