(side query: is Training Day actually worth watching? I've never seen it and don't recall any film nerd friends being like, "you HAVE TO watch this movie, Denzel and the ineffable Ethan Hawke give the performances of a lifetime; it's a must-see," so unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to go back to ignoring its existence after this post)
For the uninitiated, NYC Marathon training for most participants starts during the first week of July. Yesterday marked my first of God willingly many tiny x's on an endless expanse of calendar boxes that mock me with blank stares.
July is a fabulous time to start any physically demanding training regimen. You've got your 80-90 degree temperatures and crippling humidity, sure, but when you factor in that you're coming off of a holiday weekend that exists solely to pose the question of how many grilled meats is too many grilled meats (none, it's always none) and a six pound weight gain to show for your relentless quest for an answer along with a bunch of angry bruises dotting your legs from where they thwacked some Delaware River rocks not even 24 hours prior when, aside from the bruising, you were having SO MUCH FUN cruising down the river in an inner tube and getting blasted with your friends and OH MY GOD, WHY aren't you doing THAT right now and EVERY day instead of doing your best impression of a distance runner for the next four grizzly months?? When you factor all of THAT in?
You realize just how cockamamie this marathon racket is.
Look, as I prefaced in my About Me to the right there, I'm sure there are marathon runners so efficient at mainlining their Runner's High that the euphoria has killed off enough brain cells to make them think that training and completing multiple marathons is a good idea. I have met and am friends with many of these people, and they are unsurprisingly fit as a fiddle, exceedingly positive and great to run with. I applaud those people, I totally do.
I would argue that the majority of people training for a marathon, however, are like me--Bucket Listers. As in "I am running a marathon to cross 'run a marathon' off of my tediously coined 'Bucket List,' and when I finish I never, ever, ever, ever, want to do that ever again." Dollars to delicious doughnuts it is the Bucket Listers coating this fellow's pockets because the crafty folks at New York Road Runners know the desperate lengths we'll travel to etch strike marks on meaningless pieces of paper, since nothing compares to that sense of accomplishment that comes as a result, despite the fact that in the end we're all just going to die anyway, no nothing.
This blog is a half-hearted, McDonald's birthday party celebration of all of us committed to training but less than jazzed about it "one-offs," if you will. Make no mistake, I'm sure as SHIT going to make it to the ING finish line somehow; but if you think that means I won't delight in dragging my feet the entire way, or that running marathons is going to become some sort of nasty habit to replace beer consumption and Celebrity Ghost Story marathons (the only "right" kind), you've taken a wrong turn, my friend.
124 days to go. But who's counting?
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