As many of you know, we just celebrated our 38'th wedding anniversary.
I think she is going to keep me.
I make a point every day to tell Shelly how much I love her, often creatively. I recently cracked her up with, "I am so lucky. I can't believe your parents still let you sleep over with me!"
I have to be good at telling her I love her because I am bad at buying stuff.
Eating Elephant
Shelly has a favorite metaphor for accomplishing big goals or persevering though difficult situations. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time".
Qualifying for the NYC Marathon is a whole elephant.
My plan for this race was to take another bite of that elephant, to run this 15K (9ish miles) in 1:17:00. That is an incremental improvement over my last race. Instead of running a 10K at 8:21 per mile pace, I hoped to run this 15K at an 8:16 per mile pace. That is running both a bit farther and a bit faster.
Training
My weekly mileage peaked at 33 in several recent weeks. My longest runs were 11 miles. I toss in a couple of harder tempo runs a week, sometimes hills, sometimes long intervals like 6x1K. Otherwise, all my miles are as slow and easy as I can run with good form.
Sometimes I think Shelly isn't listening when I talk about my training like that. It has to be boring, right? She listens though, and will call me out if I say something extra silly. This week I told her I was planning some extra rest days to get ready for the race. She said, "Wait. Hold on. You think 40 minutes of cardio on your stationary bike is rest?"
Race
I am on the left in the manly shade of quartz. That was the color of the shoes I bought. Quartz. You know, like the stuff they dig out of dirty mines, with hand tools.
Luckily I had a quartz shirt to go with those shoes.
The day ended up more ... blustery.
I missed my goal by 3 seconds finishing in 1:17:03.
It tasted kinda like elephant.
