March 18, 2010

Twenty-three is such a weird number. I really just pulled that out of thin air as my distance for today's run. Halfway between twenty, which I have already accomplished, and twenty-six, the marathon distance.

It was Michael Jordan's uniform number, and is LeBron James', too, but I'm not a fan of either, so I couldn't draw inspiration from those sources.

It's a prime number, indivisible by any number other than itself, or one. I was a very poor math student, but at least I remember that. I also remember that I saw a classmate snort cocaine off his desk during a high-school geometry class. He was the only kid who managed to stay awake for that hour.

Well, no matter the reason, I elected to try twenty-three miles, one week after I was so under the weather, that I couldn't do more than two without coughing up my spleen. It would be seven more miles than I ran all last week. A little bit of a stretch, I know, but I only have a month until my marathon, so there's no way to push this back any farther.

I didn't quite make it. I chugged along pretty well until fourteen, when the granola I had with my yogurt late Wednesday night asserted itself. I think that therein lay the nuggets of my undoing. The time I spent in the bathroom caused my quads to stiffen up, and the sweat to pour off my inwardly-sloping brow.

The next five-and-a-half miles were more of a slog than they were before I stopped. When my knees are in motion, they will stay in motion until some force, like fiber, acts to stop them. And when they are at rest, they will remain at rest, until some force, my wavering will, forces them back into motion. At nineteen-and-a-half, I was wobbling like a zombie in a liquor store, so I started walking.

It was a tenth of a mile walk, then four-tenths of a mile scuffling while looking at my GPS, chug water, repeat, for the remainder. I finished the distance, if not quite in the glorious fashion I had previously envisioned. I could barely make it up the stairs, and since Amy was working, there was no one home to feel sorry for me, tell me how brave I was, and hook up my IV drip of Sunny Delight. I even had to peel my own banana-the eating of which took about an hour.

I have another long run in two weeks, and I plan to let the lessons from this one inform my choice of distance. Should I scale it back, or try to tackle twenty-three again, since I was so close? My guess is that not only will I have forgotten all about today's difficulty, I will convince myself that I need to try to get even closer to the marathon distance, in order to prepare mentally, as well as physically.
I'm guessing that I'll say, as Ernie Banks might, "Today is a great day to go twenty-five."

Thanks for humoring me.