T Minus 9 Days.....

I should be working, but I've got a bad case of the "Fridays" and all I want to do is just get the hell out of Dodge. Meaning my office, but I could sure use a few quiet, book-reading-and-writing days at the beach, too.

Just sayin'.

In any case, the foot drama continues, but I have decided to just go for it a week from Sunday (Portland Marathon day) - barring any sudden, serious red flags from the "farthest southerly" locales of the ol' bod. As most of my friends and family know, it's not a stress fracture, at least - but soreness is lingering, although it is neither severe or consistent. Sometimes it doesn't hurt at all - which is quite baffling indeed!

Aside from a very thorough warm-up and hydrating with battleship-proportions of water and electrolytes, I have a strategy (as unappealing as it is) ....and that will be lots and lots of walking. I am hoping to finish somewhere between 6.5 and 7 hours. (Wow.....even just typing that - let alone thinking about it - makes me feel crazy. It's going to be a seriously long and yeah, let's just say it - painful haul.)

I expect to be darned near incapacitated by the time I'm done, but I will have a medal and a finisher's shirt to show for it. To be sure, most folks that don't run probably can't understand why I'm willing to put myself through that kind of pain just for a shiny piece of molded metal along with yet another race shirt, but at the risk of sounding a bit schmaltzy it really does go much deeper than that. The medal and the shirt are symbolic and cumulative of all the work I've put into this endeavor, representing determination, joy, frustration, elation, pain, tears and sweat - buckets of it. Sometimes inanimate objects transcend their nature, and this is definitely one of those occasions.

Honestly, I don't know what it is about the idea of running 26.2 miles. I love to run, but this is a little different. I mean, this is a LOT of running. And in this somewhat unfortunate and unanticipated case, I'm probably going to be forced to walk 90% of the course. So am I doing this just to say that I can do it? To prove a point? Because I'm not anticipating actually enjoying a whole lot of this experience - at least probably not after I hit about the 15 mile mark, maybe even before that. Then it will be a purely mental game. I think the body parts are going to grudgingly cooperate, but they won't without a lot of bitching in the process, so mind over matter must be the "modus operandi."

I'm looking forward to this, nonetheless. I'm beginning to feel excited, now that I'm close enough to the Big Day to realize (not without a stab of anxiety, mind you) that this is real, and it's going to happen, and in many ways, there ain't no going back now. Almost a year ago when I made the decision to do this, it was so far in the future that it wasn't something I could feel or even comprehend - to be sure, it was a goal - but it wasn't real, not back then.

I can only imagine what will be going through my head next Friday!