My brain is weird. I just completed my second-to-last prep run before the Shamrock Marathon this Sunday, a short 6x400m interval. Thursday I’ll complete another short tempo run of 3 miles at race pace. I’ve trained for this thing for months… and now I have trepidation and fear I’m not going to finish while meeting my goals.
I went to a concert last night with my wife and a couple of friends and as I was driving us all back at midnight it dawned on me that this Sunday I’d be running for a longer period of time than had passed since I started hearing music earlier that evening. That’s daunting. We had an hour and a half drive back from the venue and I looked down at the Garmin and saw that I had 14 miles to the next turn. I could picture that turn ahead and the distance to it and it again hit me that I’d be running right past that distance and on for another 12 miles. What the hell?
I think it’ll be triathlons in the future. Obviously, never say never. But marathon distance I don’t think will ever be a comfortable distance.
Insert humor here
I had another shirt printed up for this race after lessons learned from my previous one. Last time, for the Marine Corps Marathon, my shirt only had text on the front and that text was quite small. (Click for a bigger image.) While running I saw many shirts… from the back, with messages that either humored me or touched me or at least distracted me. My shirt, on the other hand, was almost useless. The only people that would see me from the front were the crowds and they wouldn’t have time to read it. Obviously that didn’t work.
This time I have text on the front and back. Here’s the front:
That’s for the crowds which will hopefully be out in force in places. I figure if I can provide some humor for them they’ll be on my side. Here’s the back:
I still run in memory of my dad so I wanted to continue that. My wife asked if I was always going to leave that on there and I guess my response is “until there’s someone else that should be there.” The other thing was an effort to give those behind me a little something to hopefully take their minds off things for a few seconds. I remember many of the peoples’ shirts and signs during the MCM that provided much-needed levity and this was the funniest thing I could think of to put on mine.
It’s especially appropriate given my own reactions to this final week. Hopefully I won’t be a basket case by Sunday morning.
