A little pain, a little gain, a lot of lying around

If someone were instructed to give me a beating for every mile I've skipped in my half-marathon training plan, I'd be in for 15 and a half sound lashings. And that's just up until the point where I stopped counting. Good thing that threat of violence isn't my preferred method of motivation.

But what does motivate me? At the moment, not much. September 24th creeps ever closer, and I am a bum and a half. Or, should I say, I will be a bum in the half...

Was it a bad training plan? I'm pretty sure it was decent. Was I a bad girl? Oh, affirmative. I'm not quite sure why - although I've got a plethora of excuses: the humidity in the city. My busy work schedule. The rough terrain at the cottage. The fact that my cottage is on an island, and therefore I have to drive a boat to the mainland for every run, which makes it doubly hard to get le ass off le couch. The appeal of swimming in the lake and rowing on the lake as alternative forms of exercise - ones that don't carry the pressure of mileage and pace times, at least in my books.

Overall, it was not a productive vacation on the running front. But I did slog through a couple of toughies: a 9 miler one week and a 10 miler two weeks later. Finally, I feel as if I'm doing real long runs - I know it's all relative, but there you have it - I've crossed some sort of personal barrier and it feels good.

Not that the running always felt good. For my nine, I headed up an unfamiliar road, only to discover how literal that "up" really was. It was two steps forward, one step back on those slippery gravel slopes. By the end of the ordeal, I was cold and shaky, tight but unwilling to stretch, starving but the only food available at the time was cold french fries. Which are a totally repulsive food, and yet have never tasted as good as they did after that run - or felt so disgusting afterwards in my belly.

The ten was better - I learned to bring two gels with me and a whole lot more water, and to scootch back across the lake immediately afterwards for a good solid meal.(Ever drive a rickety outboard boat after a draining long run? You'd think the vibration is negligeable, but let me tell you, my knees sang me the saddest song in the world on that ride!) Oh, is ten miles ever long. And oh, it took me 1:55:32 to complete. That seems to me like an awfully long time to be running. Or perhaps shuffling would be the appropriate term. And the race is going to be longer, oh dear, a whole lot longer. But mercifully, much flatter. I'm counting on that, big time.

So it was sort of a running vacation. All in all, there were triumphs, yes, but heavily interspersed with guilty negligence. The running gods are not overly pleased with me. But I'm getting there, goddammit, slowly but surely - very slowly and almost surely - I'm getting there.