Ok, so I haven’t exactly been diligently posting on here about anything lately. Here’s the status of my life:
Work. Busy. And you don’t care about that.
Home. We’ve been ramping up a renovation of our main floor. Walls, flooring, kitchen, cabinets, and all the little doodads that connect it all into a livable space. Finally things seem like they are moving. We’ve got help, but because we’re cheap idiots, we’re doing a bunch of the work ourselves: demo, painting, flooring, etc. One guess how I spend every spare moment these days.
Violin. I try to hobble down to the basement, my music space, and get in at least –at least– thirty minutes of practice per day. Somehow, maybe because I’m making up for my sad lack of effort in my teens on the last instrument I learned to play, I’m actually putting in about twice that much time on an average day with the violin. Yeah, it’s more like an hour of squeaky music. I don’t sound amazing yet, but I can actually play songs. With notes. And it kinda, almost, sorta sounds like there might be some potential there.
And then Running. Yeah. That thing. I’m still training, of course, and with less than three weeks until race day, my panic mode has mellowed into a kind of resigned state of taper: there’s really not much more that can be done at this point.
Which leads me to this post:
I ran 32 klicks on Sunday morning.
Thirty-two. Three-quarters of the full marathon distance. Despite the fact we got hit by a premature winter. Despite the fact that the ground is white, in mid-October. Despite the fact that when I woke up at 6am there was freezing rain coming down in a direction I wasn’t entirely sure was vertical. I looked out the window, let out a sad little whimpering gasp (or I assume I did) and set to figuring out how to cope with the uncooperative climate.
I ran. I plodded through the local asphalt, never really more than three or four klicks radially from home. Those who remember their high school math would tell you now that a four klick radius from home would net just exactly the right amount of distance. Those who live in reality would tell you that streets don’t work out that way. In other words I covered some ground twice in that I pretty much did two lopsided laps of the neighbourhood, partly solo, partly with some motivational company.
And then somewhere in that blur of cold, wind, distance, footsteps, ice, snow, convo, traffic, asphalt, sweat, tears, pain, and quiet perserverence, I crossed an invisible finish line. I’m going to say it was at roughly 24 klicks, though unnoted, somewhere plodding along the trails skirting the nearby creek. This was when my goal-setting odometer ticked over to that seemingly optimistic (and somewhat randomly set) goal I’d written herein, way back in January: I’d run 1390 km for the year. And then I just kept running.
Goal achieved, in mid-October no less, with still a whole full and a half marathon to run before the year ends. Granted, I hadn’t planned on training for or running a marathon this year, at least not back in January when I set my pragmatic target for 2016. But now that I’ve trained, now that I’ve crossed the invisible virtual finish line for 2016, a couple of the weights of the effort have been gently lifted from my shoulders.
After all, what’s a short little marathon when you’ve logged almost fourteen hundred klicks since New Years?
