I crossed this creek just after mile two, when there was the coming promise of my calf loosening up and the mistaken belief I could stay warm. It felt like 20° when I started. Small ponds have a thin skin of ice on them. I ran 18 miles. I do not know what is happening.
It was right after this that I wrote this joke about the buzzards and hawks flying overhead It was a treatise on gallows humor, but I was only three miles into my run and that was a little too early for that sort of thing. Three is a warmup, I had 15 to go. Also, at the end, I got to track my miles. I’m doing a year-long challenge and the app says there are some 100,000 participants now. Look where I am:
Not bad for January.
I’d topped the penultimate hill right around 13.1 miles, which equaled the most I’d ever run. And I was close to home, but still had some ground to cover. So I went into a downhill stretch telling myself, over and over, to hold this pace. Hold this pace.
It wasn’t much, but it was jogging. Until the downhill became too steep, when I had to walk a bit on weary, unsteady legs. But I felt good because each step was a new record and I knew, I insisted, I was going to jog UP the last hill — a hill long and steep enough I can’t sprint its entirety on my bike — and there was no way I was cheating myself out of that. I was determined. Besides, by the time I reached that last hill I’d be about three miles from done and you can do anything for three miles.
So up that last hill I jogged, and I was then making bargains with myself, and building strategies to finish this thing. There were places to cut it short, but I was setting personal bests with each step and you don’t end that early. You can do anything for three miles. Which was an argument I began losing in mile 16. And then I couldn’t find my turn and it was cold and I’d been doing this, pretty badly mind you, but doing it, for hours. And then right at mile 17 I saw this and risked bending over for it.
This chunk of cheap molded plastic is the battleship from the board game of the same name and it was in the road at the church near the house. I could be inside in a quarter of a mile, and I wanted to be, because mile 15 was weary and slow and mile 16 might have been worse. But I had to run to 18. So I squeezed this plastic battleship in my double-gloved hand and said “I am running the last mile.”
And I did.
I wasn’t even especially sore the next day.
It snowed yesterday. We took Allie The Black Cat into the backyard:
She walked around on the deck. She prowled around on the handrail and snooped under the grill cover and slinked around in the yard a bit. She did this several times:
