And oh hey speaking of running

Whatever else happens here (will I, too, like Taylor Swift, break my legendary silence and endorse a presidential candidate, one who is an actual human being and not a walking stuffed sack of lies and decay? stay tuned!) there will absolutely still be running content on this blog. Because being a runner is nothing else if not being a person who talks about being a runner.

To wit: while I've been a bit quiet about it, after being burned by injuries a few times now, I can say I've spent the last three months or so training for my first full marathon, and I'm feeling reasonably increasing levels of confidence that I'm going to make it to race day. Race day being October 20. The race being the Columbus Marathon.

This has been a while coming. I do want to dump some more detail on the plan I've been following and what my race day goals look like and the precise ways in which training through the Cleveland summer has felt like a crazy-person thing to do. But for now I'm just going to say that I'm right around the peak block of training; according to the training plan I've been following, I've got a 19 mile run coming up this weekend, followed two weeks later by that 20 mile run. Unbelievably, my "highest total mileage" week is actually already behind me, when I hit 36 miles the week of my 18 mile run; not that this week's 34 miles is all that far off, but.

My training mood has progressed from "ugh, no, why, ugh, gross" earlier this summer to a much quieter state of "hey, whoa, this is happening, huh" today. I'll admit to having some fairly vivid fantasies about the week after the race—about how I'm going to sleep all the way in until I need to help get the kids to school, how I'm absolutely going to have a weeknight beer or three any time I like. (And oh, I will like.) But so far I've managed to not let the fantasy get in the way of continuing to get up at ungodly hours of the day that the me of twenty, ten, five, maybe even three or two years ago would have violently scoffed at.

And so now that I'm really officially calling my shot, here, if I go out tomorrow morning to run, and a small meteorite lands in front of me, and I sprain a finger or something dodging around it, and then I go to the doctor and the doctor is like, "Wow, this is a fatal finger sprain, you have four weeks to live"? Then I'll know the universe really needs me to quit this side-quest for once and for all.