Alone in the dark - December 7, 2007

Friday, December 7, 2007
Another late run today, this time by choice. At some point, I know there will be a lot of midnight runs, some to avoid the dreaded dnr, some to avoid the oppressive summer swelter. Many of my most memorable runs were at night (including several “nude mile” races back in the ‘80’s, and probably the only nude two mile relay in the history of the planet – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the Bellmore Striders Rule). Night runs and extreme weather runs. I’ve run in many hurricanes, blizzards, nor’easters and one “storm of the century.” In fact, most of the running I’ve done over the last 3 years or so has been during major storms. I’ve sat idly during week after week of perfect running weather in October, but ran twice one day in February when we got 26 inches of snow.
But today was an example of my trying to make things difficult for myself intentionally. I’m really tired from fighting this stoopid infection (it’s almost over, I think), plus it’s been a busy week at work, including the inconvenient afternoon duty. Don’t get me wrong, I laugh at myself every time I whine at spending 40 minutes in the playground with the kids, waiting for all the buses. It’s actually fun watching free-range children play. The inconvenient part is that I have to stay until 3:15 rather than 3:00. Wahhhh, poor baby. (Don’t get the idea that teaching is easy, my work isn’t done at 3:00, there’s still loads of work to get done; I either do it later at night, early in the morning, or not at all.) I went home after school and made myself comfy on the couch, with a book by my side and Stargate SG-1 on the telly. I was intrigued to find out how tempting it would become to stay on the couch, crack a homebrew, and gently drift off to sleep. As it turns out, it wasn’t that tempting. Reclining on the sofa, the postnasal drip aggravated my coughing, and that wasn’t relaxing at all. And I’m not senile enough to have forgotten how, over the last 5 days, the only time I was NOT coughing was when I was running (or swimming). Finally, I had been reciting the same mantra today as I do every day. It goes something like this.
Only the most unhealthily compulsive athlete never misses a day. The athlete who says “I haven’t missed a day in ten years” is either lying or has OCD. I don’t have OCD and I don’t want to lie. I will take a day completely off. There will be plenty of days I have to write DNR in my training log. But it will not be today.
As much as I tried to make it difficult to get out and run, I KNEW, with an absolute certainty, that before midnight I was going to put on my running gear, stretch, and run. Which I did, right after the Simpsons. In fact, it took a lot of willpower to wait that long, but I told myself I wouldn’t go out the door until the three dragons sang their song at the end of the episode.
American jerks are going home
Now we sleep for a thousand years
When we wake the world will end
And out the door I went.
3.2 miles, no time. My road is very dark when the moon and stars aren’t out and it’s not snowing. Luckily, I know from driving it several times a day that there are no potholes on the driving surface, and there isn’t much traffic (about 4 cars for a ~30 minute run, on my long run last Sunday I saw 6 cars over 8 miles), so I stayed off the shoulder. Because of the thick cloud cover, it was also much warmer than I expected. This morning it was 7 degrees, and it got up to the mid-20’s this afternoon. Running at about 9 o’clock tonight it felt just a couple degrees below freezing, still in my sweet spot, especially with no wind.
This week was scheduled to be a hard week (I alternate hard/easy weeks similarly to hard/easy days). With the urti, though, ordinary training becomes similar to altitude training. The cardiovascular, psychological and immunological stress doesn’t correlate to running-specific physical stress. I may be emotionally and internally exhausted, but my legs have had a real easy week, and they want some action. I can hear them even now (Saturday morning), whispering to the rest of the body “C’mon, let’s go, let’s RACE!!” They’ll just have to be satisfied with a nice long run tomorrow, but that smoldering competitive ember has definitely been fanned into a flame. It feels good. It feels dangerous. It is just getting started.

Wooo Hooooo!!!