Something Fat This Way Comes

Sometimes I think that the forest dreads my runs. I will tell you why. On Saturday - you know, the day that you get ready for Sunday, I was to embark on my 20 mile run. Now for you out there that are faint of heart - 20 miles is something that you prepare for weeks and months in advance. If you don't then you end up crippled by the side of the road and people laugh at you.

Mostly the grandmas jog past you and kick you because you should have died years ago but immunizations have kept you alive. But I digress.

So you get your oatmeal ready in its two cup Pyrex measuring cup. Get your water bottles filled and loaded into your pack. Shoes ready. Smelly socks from the week are OK. Shoes should be polished up from the previous week. Visor. Tunes. Could not find my sunglasses. Oh, and Mountain Dew Goo for those tough moments betwixt mile 15 and mile 20 when you body now believes that insanity has set in. You start to look for things that you could justify as an honorable death. Falling into a stream. Eaten by a cougar. 14 rattlesnake bites. So you eat the goo and your body feels better. Again I digress.

So I ran from the capital building - up 11th Avenue, down Virginia, up Federal Heights Blvd, and ended up over by Primary Children's Hospital. Then I turned my lard booty around and went back the way I came. I had a brief conversation with a guy wearing "five fingers" running moccasins and then continued down 11th Ave - took a right into City Creek Canyon, and then just when my body figured out that I might go home and take a nappy. But, no. My body knew that there was more pain on the way. Yes, the mind wanted the body to obey. The body however knew that the mind was full of ambiguity.

You head up into the gaping, laughing maw of City Creek Canyon. And yes you run run run. And you keep going and looking once in a while at your watch. Seeing how far you have gone and how much you have left. At one point my mind did not do the math and could not add 15.93 and 4.0 together and come up with 20. I had to stop, think about it, and begin running again.

20 miles is not the fascinating part of the goal. It is the fact that once you get there - you have done something else that other people cringe to think about. I should know - when my wife would go out running when training - I would cringe and go back to bed. Now, I cringe if I miss the run - and the run cringes because I, fat man, have come out to prove that I can do it again. That is why the forest dreads my run. Determination cuts through despair and pain. The fruits of that determination are the finished product.