The Beginning of the Nostalgia

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 Last 16 mile long run for the training cycle today went well. stayed on pace and felt strong throughout. A little bored around mile 12, but it could have been worse. Really grateful my legs are holding up. Fueling is always a bit tedious. Hard to believe there are only 3 more weeks until race day; that's 4 solid months of training in the bag. A quarter of a year. Race day will be my 101st run during this cycle. Only 4 more "hard" workouts and then a bunch of easy effort miles in between. Here I am starting to sound nostalgic already. It's too early for that.

But it's not an unreasonable feeling. When telling my wife about my pending 16 miler yesterday and working backwards to calculate my wakeup time (4:42am) so I could be back to take Elliott. to his soccer game  she said, "you love it". It's not exactly the emotion I would use at this juncture. More like a sense of compulsion to finish the work, knowing I'll love it in the future. Or at the very least, love that I gave it my best effort without compromise. I'm not sure what that emotion is called. Complicated?

After all of yesterday's math I ended up making it out the door by 3:45am. No alarm. Just body waking and an eye open to see the red letters of my clock staring back at me. It is a little exciting to live in a different time zone than most of the rest of the city. It also is nice to start so early and run so far that the rest of the day, no matter what happens, can already be marked as a success. 

It will all be worth it. If nothing else, I'll have these stories to look back at. 






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