hike #4

Hike #4
1/11/19
2-2.5 miles
my neighborhood out and back

What a day!!!! I was supposed to be on a 7am flight to Denver for a training this weekend, so I spent the night at a hotel in Great Falls in order to be better rested for the weekend training. (Ha! I never sleep well the night before flying because I get so anxious I'm going to sleep in and miss my flight. I was wide awake from 3am on.) As I was sitting at the gate at 6am, they announced that my flight was cancelled due to crew sickness! So after waiting in line for what felt like eternity, I  finally got rebooked for an afternoon flight out of Helena instead. I left a message for my work (since they are paying for this training) and also left a message at the main office for the training company so they would know I'd be late. I got some breakfast, then headed home to regroup before planning on heading out again, but this time in the opposite direction. Once home, I found out that I could not attend the training if I was more than one hour late - which I clearly would be since the training started before I was even scheduled to leave Helena. Argh! A stressful couple hours followed as I worked on rebooking my training, cancelling all the reservations I had for Denver, and blocking my schedule for the rescheduled training in March.  And also managing my anxiety that I was going to get fired for wasting company dollars, my worry that I might have missed some detail in all the rebookings and made a mistake that would cost us all more time and money in the end, and my guilt that I wasn't at work when technically I probably could have seen a couple patients if I hadn't gone home to prepare for going to Helena and then to Denver. (Yes, logically I know that I tend to catastrophize, but it feels SO REAL in the moment.)  By the time all these rebooking tasks were done at lunchtime I was utterly FRIED.  So getting a quick hike in seemed like a good plan. As the sun shone down and I hit my rhythm on the path, I started to feel my worries melt away. I began to truly believe that it was all going to be okay, and that I wasn't a terrible person for things that were out of my control. Is this kind of what a runner's high feels like? I ran for about five years but never felt anything even close to a "high." But I do know that I get a calm when I hike (especially when I can feel the sun and can't hear any traffic) that I can't get any other way. And now I can breathe again and perhaps even enjoy the rest of my unexpectedly free afternoon.

Blogging in the sunlight of our new greenhouse!!