Feed your soul and feel the rush!

Well I didn't look to see when my last post was, but I know it's been a long long time. My life has taken some pretty unexpected turns and through all the craziness, one of my very few constants has been my running. In December of '09 my then 26 year old sister suffered a dissection of her LAD artery (I do know what that jargon means and if you don't, suffice it to say she had what could be compared to the most severe heart attack one could endure). Doctors told us that it's miraculous she survived, and what's more - a post-trauma scan of her heart showed NO residual damage to the tissue. This is pretty much unheard of from what we can tell.
Fast forward 3 months to March 2010, the 25th to be exact - I got up at 4:20 AM as I regularly did each Tuesday and Thursday, to make it to Leominster for my workout class at 5:15 AM. At just about 5 AM I got a call on my cell phone. It was my sister Kelly telling me to get to my mother's house right away - my dad had passed away in the night. My father, at the young age of 52 had gone to sleep the night before and never woke up. I can't begin to explain how this devastated me and how profoundly my life was changed by the loss of this one man. It is almost a year later and I have yet to come to terms with the fact that he is truly gone from this earth. Just the other night I had a dream that we were chatting on our cell phones as he was returning from a long vacation. My Mom and I were there to meet him and greet him and tell him how much we had missed him. The relief that I felt knowing that he had just been on vacation was heavenly. I hugged him and hugged him and did not want to let go. Then, of course, I woke up. Damn it! Well, it's 5 AM, get up and run. Run is what I did.
I had been in a bit of a slump recently and I tell myself I have a touch of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) and it leaves me tired and not wanting to get out of bed on these cold, dark mornings. I think my Vitamin D fix from the sun is severely missed. This SADness can become a vicious cycle if you let it - you sleep in, skip your workout, have a crappy day because of it, feel bad about yourself, eat junk food all day, go to bed early, sleep too long, not want to get out of bed the next day because you feel so crappy from the lack of endorphins for the missed workout the day before and so on, and so on... At some point you have to take control back and admit that the only way to feel better is to just do it! Just get up, get your run on, check in with yourself, feed your soul and feel the rush! Just run... for your life!