My boyfriend (BF), who may or may not be running this marathon too and therefore may or may not be sometimes training with me and sometimes totally sabotaging my training, invited some buddies from Maine up to my parents' house for the long Martin Luther King weekend. I also invited some friends up from Boston; what good is an empty house in the mountains if not to entertain pals who enjoy said mountains? None I tell you.
So, the active and excited young married Maine couple, freshly adorned with new nordic skiing equipment, seriously looking so LLBean in their Subaru and sleek black snow pants, timed their arrival to coincide exactly with ours so as to lengthen the amount of time they could spend skiing. We drove in to find them wrestling in the snow bank; isn't that sweet? The sometimes-active-but-much-more-city-slicker-esque unmarried-and-living-in-sin (go team!) Boston couple didn't exactly say when they would be arriving (or leaving home) and also took several severely windy back roads and ended up a couple hours later in arriving, which really isn’t a big deal to “city folk” anyway. Guess who had to wait to greet them. Yep, me.While I could have told them that the door is never locked and there was a roaring fire in the woodstove and we get full cable television (that maybe isn't exactly paid for) and had just stocked the fridge and don't give a crap if they made themselves at home and had also acquired several kinds of alcohol for the weekend, I just said I would wait for them while the aforementioned BF ran off to nordic ski on the amazingly fun and exciting, not to mention freshly snowed upon and groomed, trails in town. Needless to say at 4pm, when they finally arrived, I didn't have the guts to ditch them and go running. PS. It still gets dark before 5 and pps. running 10 miles will take me well over an hour and a half and ppps. it was now well below 20 degrees and windy. Excuses you say? Yeah, me too. And I don't care.
So, leery of not running the requisite mileage to keep myself on marathon target, I promised myself I would run on Sunday. (I didn't say I wasn't nervous at all about sometimes not following the training program; I have enough of my dad's leftover Catholic guilt in me to make up for some things I skip). For those of you not paying attention, Sunday is technically "cross-training" day. And for those of you who haven't figured it out yet, I'm a little bit Type A and have a need to stick to things I say I am going to stick to. So forgive me for being a little cranky about having to skip my run and mess up my whole week; if you know anything, it throws me way off when I have to compromise and do something not in my plan. And did I mention it was 15 degrees colder on Sunday than Saturday? Well it sure as hell was. And that made it 11 degrees at the starting line. But I'd be a total wuss if I skipped running at all this weekend, and I can’t handle wusses. So run I did.
And 5.3 is the number of miles I made it before the wind-induced tears, arctic air blowing in my mesh toe-boxes, and frozen earlobes convinced me enough was enough. The ice-whiskers growing longer off Bruschi’s chin with each breath were kind of cute, but they also told me a story about a little place called In Front of the Woodstove where you can sit in sweatpants
and fuzzy socks and drink hot chocolate while reading trashy magazines and doing absolutely nothing. The latter activity is much preferable to running outside in wind-chill single-digits…and I am supposedly running 14 miles (twice what’s on my schedule!) next Saturday…and I had company after all.And also, the Patriots were going for the Superbowl at 3, so I kinda had to be back in time to "prepare" for that. And by prepare I mean shower, put on my Brady #12 jersey, start the chili, and open a beer, which doesn't take that long but could if I really dragged it out.
So I'm a slacker.
The end.
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