TAKEN FOR GRANTED

I missed my anniversary. It was two weeks ago. My blogging anniversary, that is. It’s been 3 years. Where does the time go?

Lots has happened to me just from starting this (and my other) blog. Opportunities I never thought about presented themselves. Now another opportunity has emerged. I’m “officially” going to help the Twin Cities Marathon with some of their press releases, runner bios, and whatever else they need.

I suppose that means I need to put aside my disdain for the use of corporate naming conventions and start referring to it as the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon. It just occurred to me that Grandma’s Marathon has been corporate right from the beginning. Maybe it’s because I grew up with that name or maybe because it’s just so unique and has a double meaning, but it doesn’t bother me in that case.

Anyway, I’ve been building my consistency by running 6 out of 7 days for the last two weeks. That’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t feel like I’m in a routine because I haven’t been doing my “normal” morning runs. After Tuesday’s evening run, I ran an easy 5 on Wednesday morning and then went back to nights with 11 last night. It’s probably no surprise that I haven’t really been following a routine for Boston, but I did throw in some MP miles last night. Since I basically have no idea what MP means any more, I stayed right around 7:00 pace.

Thanks to Eric for sending this article which keeps the stretching debate alive. Personally, I’m now in the “Runners don’t need to stretch” camp now.

Regular readers are probably aware that I tend to share the passages that I like from the books I’m reading. Lately that’s included Bowerman and the Men of Oregon and Again to Carthage, the sequal to Once a Runner. If you’re not familiar with the OAR and ATC storylines, here’s a quick summary of the books;

OAR follows miler Quenton Cassidy during a year in college. His buddy, Bruce Denton, is a gold medalist. As ATC begins, we briefly learn of Cassidy’s post collegiate running career before getting in-depth knowledge of his life outside of running. Finally, he realizes he wants to take one more crack with his running career – this time in the marathon – and he calls Denton up to be his coach. Hopefully that helps make sense of some of the passages, like this one;

Denton knew that Cassidy was still within that special physical trajectory, the place where you can still call up the powers of youth, can still aspire to impossible physical tasks. He knew, as he suspected Cassidy knew, that it wouldn’t last very much longer, but that for now it was still there.

For Denton, it was years in the past now. Even so, he was far more of a physical specimen that all but a handful of the twenty-year-olds on the campus…Cassidy was physically now in a place that for Denton existed only in memory.

It would always be the best of times, he thought. That’s what we are condemned to know. And it’s not just the youth. Everybody gets that. It’s youth blazing along on some kind of spectacularly high octane. It’s like having a benign fever all the time. It’s like being in love.

No one around us could possibly have understood, but we did. We must have known. We must have drunk it up as best we could. But could we really understand how fleeting it all would be? Could we be sure we were squeezing every drop out of it? Could we understand that it would not, could not last? That nothing burning that hot ever does?

There’s something about that passage that fires me up. It reminds me of my college days where everyone on the team is really fit and ripped. And we all took it for granted.

Quote of the day;

“I can't remember a mile race in my life that was even mildy amusing.” - Quenton Cassidy in OAR