Tuesday, April 05, 2005
My purpose in running Around the Bay was to see if I could do the necessary distance during the winter to run a Spring marathon. (My purpose in registering as early as I did was to commit to doing the distance necessary to run Around the Bay-- this all gets very regressive.) When I think about cool marathon venues certainly Dublin comes to mind, but Paris-- in April, no less, would be pretty nifty. Not this year, not next year, but at some point that would be a great trip. As I was doing my thing, Meg Hourihan, famous weblogger (one of the developers of Blogger, in fact) was training for Paris. She ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon the week before I went to Hamilton, and struggled. Today she announced that she will not start on race day.
That takes a lot of guts, frankly. She has been out there in public saying she was going to, and now she will have "DNS" (or the French equivalent) next to her name. It can't have been easy to have pitched all that preparation, but her reason is sound: if you can't do the thing and have fun ("feel good" is probably asking too much) than you shouldn't do it. I've run more Boilermakers in pain than I have run Boilermakers healthy, but I've had fun at each one-- when they stop being fun, I'll stop. I wonder, though, if it might not have helped her over the hump if she had prepared for this race with someone. I'm looking forward to Saturdays this Spring, wherever we do our running. Knowing that other people are going to be miserable with me has gotten me out there on quite a few weekends.
That takes a lot of guts, frankly. She has been out there in public saying she was going to, and now she will have "DNS" (or the French equivalent) next to her name. It can't have been easy to have pitched all that preparation, but her reason is sound: if you can't do the thing and have fun ("feel good" is probably asking too much) than you shouldn't do it. I've run more Boilermakers in pain than I have run Boilermakers healthy, but I've had fun at each one-- when they stop being fun, I'll stop. I wonder, though, if it might not have helped her over the hump if she had prepared for this race with someone. I'm looking forward to Saturdays this Spring, wherever we do our running. Knowing that other people are going to be miserable with me has gotten me out there on quite a few weekends.
