Tortoise and the Hare

It has been a while since I posted anything on the blog - I have been trying to pay a little more attention to other things in life and right now, while I am really enjoying running, it would be really boring to create reports on a regular basis - at least more than it normally is. Here is why it would be so boring to report on. I am currently base training for the lead up to the Boston Marathon. With this approach, I am running all of my runs at a pace in which I can remain conversational the entire time. Read, no real speed. What I am doing is trying to get a good aerobic base in over the next couple of months with an aim towards speed specific training in the 2009. So for now, I am the proverbial tortoise.

This leads me to the Hare. For those of you who have read my profile, or the earliest of my postings, you will recall the reason I got into this whole running thing is to become competitive with my childhood friend. In our first race together, he paced me and almost got me to a Boston Qualifying time. That first marathon was completed after only 9 weeks of training - the result of him seeing a picture of me in a 5K I had signed up for on a whim without real training and making the comment in response that my time was "not bad for a guy carrying two hams around his waist". I took the comment as a challenge and as a result of the relative ease in which he paced me, I felt the need to at some point challenge him.

So here we are one year later. I have qualified for Boston and we are going to run it together. The intention at this point is for us to run the first 24 miles together pacing each other and then, in a form of childishness that is rampant in middle-aged males, we are going to race the final 2.2 miles in a fight for bragging and/or Last rights. Seriously, I am really looking forward to this. Running has allowed us to share something in the past 1 1/2 years that would not have been possible otherwise given our geographic dislocation - goals. So while I will be pushing myself as much as possible from the start in Hopkinton to the finish in Boston, I will also be in the moment with more than a few memories of when we were side by side on the same line playing hockey as kids. Who knew we would be still competitive in sports 30 years later.

Perhaps the message in all of this is that running is my mid-life crisis - if it is, I think I could have chosen worse.