Deciding to go for a run is one thing, but when it comes to doing it, so many things conspire to get in the way.
October 20, 2010
I ran 2 x 800 metres and a 1/4 mile at “speed” plus a couple of straightaways. No hamstring issues, no back spasms, no medals. A perfect workout on a mist-rising-into-the-full-moon-sky kind of morning. Like the mornings from way back when football practice or track practice was coming and the cheerleaders were gathered on the steps, doing their stuff. Never went out with a cheerleader though. In high school I don’t remember going out with anybody.
Years later, I went out with a professional figure skater who had been a cheerleader in high school for her older brother’s baseball team. He went on to pitch for the Cleveland Indians. As I remember it now, our relationship, if that’s what it was, lasted as long as his pitching stint in the “bigs”. You might say that it — his career — lasted long enough to have a cup of coffee and a shower. You might not.
October 21, 2010
Gonna run later. “Famous last words” as my father used to quietly say accompanied by a small “not again” shake of his head, much to my constant irritation — up to and including this morning. Of course, he wasn’t here but the words, oh my, those words.
It was a morning after not much sleep, a kitchen calamity involving both the automatic coffee machine and the fuzzy-headed coffee maker along with the added benefit of a shower of muesli from the not-properly-closed cereal bin, and a small clean up of the spilled coffee. (It’s not really possible to spill coffee when it’s being made in a closed container that requires only that the water in the tank; the coffee is ground and in the filter which is in the filter holder, and the cover is closed…except that it is…it has…something to do with not putting the carafe under the drip spout, which doesn’t drip until the carafe top compresses it and then, voila, there’s coffee on the counter top.)
After a “good vacuuming” of the kitchen at 4:22 a.m., it was time to run, said he (me, that is). Gonna run in a few minutes, gonna check my email. Not much there so I thought to get on top of the photo editing that needed doing, and so I did. Well, I did get to the editing after I straightened up the bookshelf behind the desk. Then I got a phone message in my email from the cell phone I left upstairs when I came down to my office to edit. It reported to me (no shaking head here except mine) that I had blown a 7:00 a.m. — a meeting which I was supposed to lead. Not running yet, as you can see.
I went to the meeting, made apologies, came back and finished the editing. It’s now later and there is still no running. Gonna lift WEIGHTS instead and run twice as long tomorrow. Except for the tomorrow part, it is a good plan. You can’t make up “missed” miles”; you can only run the miles you run which means instead of a rest day this weekend there will be consecutive running days. And so it goes…
Photo Credit
“Clock” 19mm@Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
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