#2 Running Nirvana Is...

Wherein I recount my running highlights for the year…as if any of you care.

Whose idea was this countdown anyway? This is getting tedious to come up with FIVE highlights. I don’t think I have five highlights in my entire life. I have one wife and two kids. That’s three (or two if you stack the kids to make one adult human). I did win a first place trophy in a 3 v. 3 basketball tourney once (but it was in Canada so I’m not sure it really counts. That’s like winning a curling trophy…in the U.S.) I should have just linked to each of these incidences that I’m posting about as they were already covered before. But, since I refuse to follow the First Rule of Holes, I’m going to continue digging.

#2 Chugga Chugga Choo Choo

When you are a baby, people sneakily feed you vegetables by simulating a train with a spoon approaching your mouth tunnel. It works. And is hilarious. I’d laugh so hard I’d giggle and giggle in that cute little baby way until I squirted out a little orangish brown surprise for mommy in my pants.

When I am an old dried up prune, my kids will return the favor and deliver my meds on a spoon with a chugga chugga choo choo open wiiiide while I giggle and leave a little Metamucil byproduct in my adult diaper. Though I doubt they’ll be able to pinch my ankles up in the air with one hand when it’s changin’ time like I could do with them. And I have no intentions on making it easy for them. In fact, I’ll train myself to make each bowel movement a Movement in Two Acts if you get my meaning.

In between these life stages, I find the train noises are still occurring. There might be some sort of psychiatric mumbo jumbo at work here but, I found, I concentrate pretty well on maintaining speed as I tire if I imagine myself a train rolling down the tracks. My breathing takes the form of coal delivery to the engine. Feed the engine. Roll the wheels. Off we go.

Usually, a training run doesn’t qualify for a highlight. But this is my list so you can just shut up about it if that is what you were thinking. This was a great training run. One of those once-in-a-Meat-Loaf-album kind of runs. I ran fast. I ran easy. Rarely did a murderous thought cross my frontal lobe. Thomas the Tank Engine was the wind beneath my wings.

I knocked out these 15 miles at a 6:54 pace and I really felt like I could go further at the same pace. It was a real confidence booster. I toyed with the idea of extending to 17 miles but my inner Sir Topham Hatt called me into the station.

I remember thinking that there was no way any of my other long runs would go as smoothly and, sure enough, they didn’t. I caught the tiger by the tail…the bull by the horns…the train in the station…that day. If there was ever a good time to light fire to myself and call it a running career, that was the time.

But I didn’t.

Instead I went inside and emptied my used coal deposits with a big ole relieved smile on my face and a kerplunk in the bowl.

Toot toot (grunt grunt).

Happy tracks.