Moving is hard.
If anyone tells you otherwise, they are liars. That, or they had professional movers.
(I’ll get to that in a minute.)
For the past month or so, I have tried to put my finger on the proper word of the year for 2015 because it truly was the tale of two years. I started off the year by running the most exhausting trail run I’ve ever taken on, the Swamp Forest Half in Tallahassee, where I relied on salt tablets from strangers and the shear will to survive (and shower) to make it through. In a way, that race was some weird metaphor of the year itself with its unexpected adversity and with my hobbling away knowing that I would eventually race another day. After a few other awesome races with friends throughout the year, we flew up to Seattle to take on the Seattle Rock n’ Roll Half and coincidentally (as in I got off the plane and the HR department called me to asked me set up an interview) interviewed for the job that would have us back up in the Evergreen State less than a month later. That time, we packed a little heavier.
Back to my opening line, moving across the country took every ounce of marital fortitude and luck we could scrounge up. At this point you’re thinking “but Nathan, it’s just driving a truck! How hard could it be?” Well…it’s not just driving a truck. It’s driving a GIANT truck with your car attached to a trailer that’s held on by a few chains with all of your worldly possessions inside. It’s also the getting stuck on an abandoned road with a locked gate at the end of it in Monroe, LA and you have to back the truck up 100 yards with no shoulder and with the help of Monroe’s finest all because you tried to take a shortcut to Cracker Barrel thanks to Google Maps NOT ONLY to get your truck stuck at a gas station 5 hours down the road in Canton, TX. It’s the getting through the 75 mph winds on a two-lane stretch of stretch of interstate in Wyoming for nearly 200 miles. And it’s the driving into a new town and your bank freezes your account because you are trying to pay for your first month’s rent with it and then you spend all night moving everything up the stairs with no A/C during a freak heat wave. (Shout out again to my brother-in-law Andrew, cousin-in-law Darby, and my in-laws Mark and Pattie for helping us get everything in the apartment.) Then, your wife flies to ENGLAND the first week of living in this new place and you have to figure it all out pretty much on your own. So yeah, it’s not the driving that makes moving across the country. It’s everything else.
Now I’m exhausted from just writing that. Someone get me a Powerbar.
Where was I?
Like all moves, those first few months are hard. Everything changes from a new phone plan, to where you run on Saturday mornings, to where you get takeout, to who you hang out with, to dealing with a new job. I simply spent August through November trying to establish some semblance of normalcy in my life. Thankfully, I have an amazing wife and live in a city that I absolutely adore. And while I was trying to get back to normal, I ended up scaling back on the other facets of my life that make this blog interesting. You see, blogging, running, and healthy eating are all these muscles that you have to continuously work on to get stronger and to make them easier. 2015 essentially gave me this trauma-inducting atrophy that affected all of those things. While I’m nowhere near back to square one (square one was almost 100 pounds ago) it surely feels that way.
So now we’re here in 2016. I’m 29, have a new job, live in a new city, attend Weight Watchers meetings with some truly amazing people, and am slowly easing my way back into this fitness identity that I have missed dearly. This blog gets me out of my head. I can be open about my life and hopefully inspire others during their own fitness journey. Expect a lot more from the FFK this upcoming year.
Call it FFK: Seattle.
YEEEEEEOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!
[Insert some weird The Who and Soundgarden intro music mashup here]