26.2: Thinking and Thinking and Thinking

I'm still thinking about doing a full marathon this year, but am having a hard time pushing myself over the first mental hurdle of signing up. September has been a training-free month for me; I've been running but not with a specific goal in mind and nothing terribly long. It's been kind of nice, but I'm not sure how well I'll keep it up without some sort of feat of athletic endurance on the horizon. And so today, I randomly came across a couple of things that make me think I should probably just take the leap:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” -Mark Twain
(To me, this does not sound sarcastic enough to really be Mark Twain, but I suppose that when you are discerning the metaphorical tea leaves of your life and seeking guidance from the Great Out There, as well as the random crap you read on the Internet, you can't be overly picky).

And:
Inaction is the surest path to failure. You cannot succeed if you never try.
grrrr. I know. But it's so much work.

The inherently lazy me is still thinking "that is such a long distance, that is so much training, I don't know if I can do it." And also, for the race I'm considering now, the longest run of the training schedule will be the day after Christmas, which seems like a not terribly auspicious time to run 20 (!) miles. At that time last year, there was something like two and half feet of snow on the ground. Although, on further thought, "longest run on the day after Christmas" could be moved to the "pro" column, considering Christmas is a little stressful and I usually eat a good amount of crap on Christmas day and a long run is a good cure for both of those ills, and a good excuse to ditch my family for a few hours (family, I love you!). And really, even if I can't finish a marathon, I will have lost nothing but some time and I can't really count that as a loss because I love cranking up my iPod and hitting the pavement, or treadmill, for some uninterrupted time to swim around in my own head. And also, it is possible that this will be something I'm only able to do for a limited time in my life; if I learned nothing else from breaking my back, I now know down to my bones that physical ability is a gift, and one you don't necessarily get to keep forever. (And also that sliding down an icy slope on a cheap piece of plastic crap is bad idea.) So, probably I should run while I can, and because I love to run, and because I feel better when I do, and to find out how far I can go because otherwise I will never know. But, dang, that is a really long way.