saturday

Week 10 is in the books. I was slated to run 15 miles yesterday, but ended up going 16 because I wanted to get as far west as Clague Park in Westlake, where I was reasonably sure I'd be able to find water.

In my previous four workouts I had been running with others, which helped rein in my pace. But on my own yesterday, I was back to running a little too fast. A nice run though, overall. I was feeling really great at the halfway point and it wasn't until the last two or three miles that the going got tougher. Once I finished, my knees and ankles staged a delayed revolt, and it was a little while before I was walking normally again. Even now my legs feel a bit achy, but I expect they'll be back to their old selves once Tuesday's short run rolls around.

It is kind of fun to be constantly raising the bar of distances that I have gone, but I am also finding that the satisfaction is accompanied by what I guess could best be described as a sense of isolation. As the training progresses and nears its peak, I am feeling acutely the difference between my Saturdays and those of a typical person. While other folks may be enjoying a leisurely breakfast, I am applying Body Glide and suntan lotion to protect my skin and making sure I have a charged iPod and Gatorade cooling in the fridge. I travel on foot to far off locales, and when I turn around to head back home I am invariably in a spot that, had I been dropped there at random, I would consider myself more or less stranded. I used to be able to casually describe what I was doing as "going out for a run", but this is a less accurate label when the runs are two hours in length.

Now, though it is challenging, I am not saying that the way I spend my Saturday mornings is inherently better or worse than eating pancakes. I hope it is a good use of my time and energy, but sometimes it just feels like a weird choice. I have developed a freakish ability that has little real-world application, unless I were being chased by a determined but slow creature that could not exceed 8 mph.

If these last few paragraphs have a point, I suppose it's to say that it's harder to describe my weekend to others when my Saturday workouts are 16 miles long instead of more rational 6 mile jaunts. I don't expect them to understand and I'm not sure that I do fully. The whole "training for a marathon" line is a good cover, but hopefully I can arrive at a better sense of what exactly I'm doing before this is finished.