So here is the thing: I had to get in a long run. Normally this happens on Saturday, but it was necessary to change up my routine so that I could get in a long swim on Saturday.
NOW IT GETS COMPLICATED. I wake up at 4:45 multiple mornings a week, and I had a messy allergy day that involved medication and for all these reasons, I knew that I was going to be unable to wake up at 4:45 and run until 7:15. I knew this was no going to happen. Now, my older son was in kindergarten but I still had the two year old with me for the day. He was not going to stay in the jog stroller for the long run, it was sweltering outside and I just don't do more than three miles with the jog stroller, nor does my two year old for that matter. SO, my options were running thin. I decided that the YMCA was going to have to make it happen for me and they did, albeit I feel we all did it begrudgingly.
SO, after dropping my youngest at the nursery, I ran a long 6 miles on a treadmill that had spotty television reception and sound that faded in and out while I watched Kelly Rippa interview Kerri Russell about the second installment of Planet of the Apes, which is a film that I probably will not see. All in all, very dissatisfying.
But it gets worse.
After 6 miles on the treadmill, I was worn thin with my indoor workout. The YMCA has a policy that if your child is in the nursery, you can run in the parking lot, but not leave the premises, lest some emergency unfold with your child. I get it, I can't just leave my child at the YMCA and go galavanting off into the sunset while somewhere in the distance chariots of fire plays and my hair blows in the wind. So it was, that I ran in the parking lot. I told myself before I started that a lap around the parking lot was probably like half a mile and the run would not be that bad. HOWEVER, like so many things I have told myself over the years, this turned out to be an exaggeration concerning the former and a lie concerning the latter.
A lap around the parking lot turned out to be 1/8 of a mile, the temperature in the blacktop parking lot was just unbearably hot and it felt like much more of a death march than a five mile run. It was just terrible, and it will go down in the history of my exercise routine as one of my more foolish endeavors.
I remember reading an article in the New Yorker about a man with one leg who climbed Everest and the article, brief and somewhat scornful, begged the question "why"? "Why" in terms of the danger, the risk to other climbers, the arduous nature of the trip; but it was a triumph in the face of a particular man's life tragedy and I don't know that it is for the New Yorker to ask the question "Why". I feel, however, that it is within everyone's purview to ask me the question "why".
And I will say that I should have just let it go. Lesson learned. I should have been more flexible and thought of a different routine or just taken a nap and eaten a cookie. Aahhh, long run. Why did I let you guilt me into the silliest run I ever ran?
