The Marathon Man - wherein we contemplate the season

...he went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season." -- From Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine

The poor fellow was a computer engineer trying to understand what was happening in a computer every billionth of a second. The idea of dealing with no unit of time shorter than a season resonated with me this week. 

This Wednesday was our second assessment run - the only timed runs, so far. We ran 3 miles and recorded the time. I was five minutes quicker than the first one, and that was with a fair amount of distraction during the run. (There was a fire or rescue or something in the area with a lot of fire department activity.) After the run, the cloud cover made it seem like an early sunset and that started the rumination about seasons.  I started with Team in Training about six weeks before the summer solstice. You notice things like sunrise and sunset when you spend so much time running outdoors. 

This marathon training season will run just shy of 5 months. I'll have started in Spring and I will run the marathon this Fall. For someone with the patience of a 12 year old, that's a pretty amazing commitment. And it helps reinforce the value of thinking longer term. Not today, or this week, but in seasons and years.

Consider that two years ago this month I bought a bike and decided that was going to be my road to exercise salvation. I was in such poor shape that I had to walk it over a hill that's between my house and the grocery store. Today, I rode to the store and handled the the hill with no problem. It's good to take the long view.

The Saturday run, 14 miles, is just a way point towards a bigger goal. By the end of the month, it won't even stand as my longest run anymore. In six weeks, I'm running a marathon.

If you're just joining us, this is all about me running the CowTown Marathon this October as a fund raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Details can be found here.  You can make donations here.

Posted via email from Lee's posterous