I live in the southwest corner of Edmonton, a city of about a million people in western Canada. I usually run from a local recreation centre which has access to hundreds of klicks of sidewalks and paved, gravel or single track trail.
Occasionally you need to push yourself out the door. Occasionally, literally.
On day 19 of this daily streak, after a fast jaunt one day previously, after everything it was everything I could do to lace up and get my twenty minute minimum in. It was not fast. It was not pretty. It was a plod of milage just to say it had been done.
Sure, I felt better after than before, but ... I could probably say the same thing about a nap.
On Sunday, LC says to me as we’re hanging out in the parking lot after our twelve klicks (he did thirty!) and sipping our well-earned social-distancing coffees that he is meeting up with LS on Tuesday... if I was interested.
This morning I was tired. Lead-in-the-legs, aching-all-over tired. Part of me was looking for an excuse to skip a day, an excuse that never came, but at the end of it all I had planned my day around this six-thirty meetup with the guys.
I show up and ... it’s the fast guys.
It was my wife’s birthday so in lieu of being a rotten husband and going for a run when I should have been making her dinner and watching her cut the cake, I put in a five klick run at lunch. Simple.
If I hadn’t been streaking a fourteen day record, I would have sat out day fifteen without hesitation.
A twenty-seven klick morning ride burned me out, and we popped over to J&B’s house for a backyard beer shortly after lunch — and it was still sloshing around my stomach as I ran in the spitting rain (that was threatening to turn into a thunder storm.)