My Conscience is Bothering Me

...so I need to explain about my last ten miles.

At about mile 7, I got a phone call. Yes. I always run with my phone. Partly for safety reasons, (need I remind you of the "Dog Incident" in the Fall of '07?) and partly because, well, I'm a mom. I suppose I could be heading up Heartbreak Hill at mile 20 in the Boston Marathon, and if one of my kids called, yeah, I suppose I would answer it.

So. I get a call. From one of my kids. Who is having a crisis. And in a super-human show of strength, I restrained myself from saying, "I think I told you last night at 9 pm that I would be happy to help you then if you would only get home." and instead, I said, "I'm running back to town from Grandma and Grandpa's. Come get me."

In the interest of family privacy, I will not say which child it was that was in crisis. But it was a child who can drive. Driving child picked me up at mile 8.

About three hours later, the crisis was happily resolved--we're going to state! Yay! I mean, she's going to state! Yay!--and I still hadn't eaten and I was stiff from sitting and my feet were on fire.

But. I was still in my running shoes. And my running clothes. And, dadgummit. I mean, dadgummit. I had wanted to run ten miles. Today. Besides, I had told all of my classes that I was planning on running ten miles last weekend, and, let me tell you, you do NOT want to disappoint a room full of inmates. (Which, by the way, is a highly effective motivational tool. If you tend to procrastinate, just tell 50 convicts that you're going to do something. That'll hold you to it.)

So I drove back out to the country, hid a water bottle in the fence row, marked one mile, parked my car and got my stiff, sore, hot, hungry self back on the road. I ran one mile to my water, chugged it, then turned around and ran one more mile back to my car. Ten total miles in one day. Just not all in a row.

But I counted it anyway because I have never in my life done anything as physically difficult as peeling myself out of that car for those last two miles. I guarantee you it would have been much, much easier to just finish that ten the first time.

That's my confession. Thanks. I feel better now.