Perfect Ten

This morning I left the house at 6:20. On a day that I didn't have to work. Dumb, right? But do you know what you missed if you were still in bed at 6:20? Well, you missed my angry seething rage at every house that I passed that was still dark and looked like it contained sleeping people (because of course, the tiniest person in my house thought 4 was a totally acceptable time to turn on his light and start playing with his trucks this morning oh, and EVERY MORNING THIS WEEK), but you also missed how the sky was this really cool dark grey and how over the next two hours, it slowly turned from dark grey to light grey with various shades in between.

I forgot how utterly quiet the world can be on a weekend morning before 7. I saw no one, aside from a group of guys in orange hats carrying guns into trucks. I hope they were hunters, otherwise I witnessed the forming of an early morning militia.

And then lost in the peace and quiet of it all, I ran this many miles...

Since I haven't begun my half-marathon training yet, I never really set out with an exact mileage in mind. I give myself a few different options, then just see how I feel. Today I felt great. At two miles, I thought, "Hmm... could I?" And I did. At 7 miles, I thought, "Just a 5k left!" Traffic was blissfully light this morning, so I managed to cross roads without having to stop, until I hit 8.5 miles. I lost my stride a little bit after that, but I still managed to finish at a sprint.

Today as I was running, I was thinking about how in gym class, I never even ran a mile (actually I was thinking about a lot of things, like how the Burger King sign was advertising cheese fries and how good that sounded or how warm my head was thanks to the magical Mizuno headband somehow turning my sweat into heat, magic, I tell you). In gym class, I walked a slow fifteen minute mile, running only when a gym teacher would glare at me. Part of that, I think, is that I don't remember them conditioning us, I just remember them being like, Okay, today we're running a mile. I never had a chance to prove to myself that I could run a mile, and I certainly never even let myself try, instead saying that I couldn't run. Plus I was intimidated by the boys who could run a five minute mile and man, gym class was DUMB. I do not miss that aspect of middle and high school at all.

But it's interesting how you can convince yourself of something for years and years, like that you can't run, and then one day, you decide to stop convincing and start doing and hey, imagine that. You can do it, after all.