Admittedly, I have trust issues with my entire calendar at this moment.  Several races were cancelled and I've been playing it by ear with the swimming facility that I use.  As of this morning, I lost 4 paid gigs and nervous about booking any flights until the dates are closer -- and who knows if I'll have the money to finance it by these dates.  At the moment, COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on the entire world and people have justified reasons to be nervous.  Watching how organized events start to unravel over the course of a few weeks, my feelings shifted from disappointed to numbness.  Within a month, a great chunk of my scheduled races are gone:  Tokyo Marathon, New York City Half Marathon, a change of date for The Love Run and my Hot Chocolate 15K in Philadelphia is officially a virtual run.  With the exception of the Tokyo Marathon, I feel like all of these places handled it the best way that they possibly could -- I'll be kind and reserve my feelings since we're kinda going through a pandemic.

Surely people are hurt from the change in events and this goes well beyond running.  New York City feels eerie from the lack of people populating the gym or local pool.  Restaurants are thinning particularly Asian establishments -- thanks xenophobia.  Pictures of Times Square surfacing the internet are being compared to every horror movie or crazy book known to man.  And because I'm a fitness aficionado, I am loaded with questions about what I will do to press forward.  After all, fitness is not just something that I do for fun. I am a freelancer who uses her platform to speak about these adventures -- which requires for you to be around people.  At this moment, my social media accounts are bogged down with concerns about their training going to the wayside to questioning how will people maintain their marbles as the world goes COVID-19 crazy.  

If it feels like it's been a long time since I've wrote anything consistent here, that would be painfully accurate.  There's not one particular reason that I can give you but I can throw out a few:
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1. My 2019 schedule was built for an endurance nutter like me;
2. I underestimated how busy I'd be as a full time sponsored athlete;
3. Shitty comments from random fuckers I don't know on the internet made me reevaluate posting regular updates on here -- or anywhere.

Through one on one interactions with people in the running community and with loved ones reminded me about the reasons why I constructed this crazy website Running Fat Chef and it damn sure wasn't for internet fame.  I truly love blurbing about the highs, lows, unstable moments and adventure that comes with fitness, particularly running.  By having a honest heart to heart with myself, I buried myself under a blanket, wrote down a list with my insecurities, rolled it into a shape of a blunt and decided to say "fuck all of that shit-- I'm writing again."  

With that said, let's talk about my 2019 highs and lows before the year is out -- and let's start with my DNFs.
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I've done my share of relatively dumb shit -- I'm not sure if I'd count my race calendar as one.  To people who aren't ultra runners or enjoy the stark feeling of dancing with death by blisters may look at me rather strange.  After fixing up this website to make it look like an adult who cares about their life actually blurbs here, I realized that I signed up for a shit load of races this year -- some that's not even on the website calendar as of yet.  I'm looking at a minimum of ten marathons, a 50 miler, one TransRockies Run that total 120 miles with a 20K climb over the course of six days and yeah, I'm massaging the thought of signing up for a 100 miler.  Perhaps I did fall short on a special sort of stupid but I love it.  It doesn't stop me from asking myself what the fuck did I just sign up for each and every time.