Tick tock...

Still haven’t gotten out there.  Thank you all for the invitations to run.

 

I have a definite conflict of interest on Sunday (and no, I don’t mean “conflict of interest” as in “I’m not interested in running”).  I’m certainly not ready for any 25k (I’m maybe 5 or 6 days of good training away from that), but I’m almost certainly up for a good 8k (however far that is, I don’t speak Metrican).  I’m not saying I won’t pop up in the Woodlands on Saturday, though.  However, we’re going camping Saturday night, which is the conflict on Sunday AM.  I may take a wooded run on Sunday morning out in New Caney, though.  It’d be a good opportunity to spend a couple of hours just running “nude” (no clocks, no gear, no route, just me and the road).

 

I discovered the concept of working out “nude” when I hit a plateau while cycling awhile back.  We’ve all done it at some point.  No matter how much we try, no matter how much we concentrate our effort, we just can’t get over some kind of hump—weight, time, speed, distance, whatever.  I hit a plateau, and then I stumbled across a biking article about “biking nude”.  Being a guy I naturally opened right to the article to see what they had to say, and the concept is basically that we get so obsessed over some metric that we lose sight of the overall joy of going out and just letting it fly in the wind.  You sit in the saddle (or, rise up on the balls of your feet) and just ride.  No time.  No top speed.  No distance.  No worries and no bothers.  One requirement, of course, is that you take a different route than normal because chances are you know every split, every dip, every bump, every curb, every light, every sign, every shrub, every everything along the way, and the idea is to just go out and ride…  nude.  So, Sunday, if I run, I’m just going to go out and run nude on a completely foreign course without my stopwatch.

 

I may bring my cell phone, in case I need a ride back to camp.

 

To answer my favorite Brazilian, no, there is absolutely no chance I’ll actually win the marathon in January.  Well, there’s some chance, but if I did actually cross the line first we’d have bigger problems scraping the bacon off the upper floor windows of Houston’s skyscrapers (that is to say, darlin’, pigs will be a-flyin’ if I win the marathon).  However, I will cross that finish line, even if I cross last.  Because for my marathon, what counts is not where I finish, but that I finish.  Anything less than 26.2 miles will be a monumental failure for me.  I can’t look at it any other way.  However, I also know that the greater factor on Marathon Sunday is not the will to finish, but rather the will to train.

26.2, no less, and not a step more.

 

That all said, I do have my running bag today.  I’m going to run tonight.  I don’t really want to run, but I want to not run even less.  I have to get out there.

 

Left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right…