I pulled a very mean trick on myself today, but it was for my own good.  Besides, if I actually knew what I was going to do today, I would have probably psyched myself out of it!

With the pandemic gripping the globe and reasonable calls for social distancing from public health authorities, I have found a new appreciation for having a workout room in the basement. This room is one thing that I am especially fortunate to have since moving to Wisconsin.  I took advantage of it on a regular basis before the spread of covid-19 made homebodies of the lot of us.

My usual answer for stress in my life is to go downstairs and log some miles. If anyone told me a year ago that a run would be my answer to a bad day, I’d have laughed in your face. Yet here I am, writing a post that I didn’t expect to be writing until October. (I committed to running a marathon in October, figuring that I could get my backside in gear in the time between now and then.)

It’s been a week, for all of us.  Atop that, I had an interview on Friday for my ideal position here (more on that in another post), and now all I can do is wait.  This is the one thing that drives me crazy, because I am not a passive person.

The 10K I did yesterday didn’t fully cut through the stress, so I committed to log more miles today.   Armed with my water bottles, headset, Pandora tunes and a tablet with my favorite mindless video game app (Summoners War for those who are curious and/or geeky), I went downstairs to work through my frustrations.  My agreement to myself was to go for at least as long as I played the game on a progressively harder mode.   Throwing some Lords of Acid on repeat should give me a good cadence to keep moving and occupy my brain.  When I could no longer beat the level by pressing the auto play button, I’d be done.  Simple, right?

At least that was the plan.

In actuality, the team of characters I had on auto play has been buffed and optimized quite thoroughly over the last month.  Consequently, I had no idea just how far the team was going to go on auto play, but I kept plugging along, alternating between a power walk and a light jog.  When all was said and done it was several hours later.  I failed a level on auto play twice (to make sure I wasn’t taking the easy way out) I went much further than I expected.  

I was seventy-nine levels into the game, and had cleared twenty miles on the treadmill. 

Well, shit.

When one gets into distances, there is a thing one tends to do.  It’s a game of a sort.  After one runs a certain distance, there is a tendency to “round up” and complete the next typical race distance. It makes things nice and neat and helps them to feel complete.  Rounding up to a 5K, 10k, or even a half marathon is one thing, but a full marathon?   This was something entirely different.

Or was it?

Damnit, I was not going to let less than a third of what I already did get in between me and something I was already committed to doing, albeit months down the road.  If I stopped now, I’d start from 0.0 the next time I came down here.  For me, this was unacceptable.

Screw it all, my next stop was 26.2 miles. I was going to go for a marathon distance today.

I cursed at my video game characters for being so finely tuned, and set the progressive game on hard mode. It was my hope that this would give me enough brain candy to get through the final stretch.  The damn game tricked me into going this far, it may as well help me the rest of the way. It’s a wonderful thing to have something to take my mind off the distance.  Boredom is my undoing, and anything that helps me get past the hurdle of my own mind is a good thing.

 Mercifully, the game lasted in hard mode long enough to give me the mental distraction that I needed to not do myself in before my goal.  I managed to finish 26.2 miles in 5 hours, 30 minutes, and 18 seconds.

I laughed,  I cried, and I was a shaking mess and more than a bit loopy from doing the thing.   Even now, a bath and two meals later, I am not entirely all there, but I don’t feel nearly as wretched as I did after my first half marathon last summer.

All things considered, I feel pretty damn good.  It’s time to now watch the presidential candidate debate.