When 13 Is A Lucky Number

I’m pretty good at remembering things.  I can still tell you my phone number from my freshman year in undergrad (and to give you an idea how long ago that was, my phone was rotary), and a few years ago when my husband, was doing our taxes, he asked where I kept the kids’ social security numbers and I pointed at my own head.  That said, as I start building my race schedule along with work trips and family schedules, my brain is beginning to feel a little full.  So, on Saturday as I drank coffee and procrastinated from starting my workout, I decided to open up an Excel spreadsheet and type up my race schedule. 

After a few minutes, I stare at it and am completely petrified.  Now, anyone who knows me also knows that I am such an Excel guru that Microsoft would call me when they get stuck, so it’s not the spreadsheet itself that has my shorts in a bind.  What’s scaring me is the words I’ve typed in.

My race schedule is all in front of me, and this is what I see: the NYC Half Marathon next week, 3 races in April including the MORE/Fitness Half Marathon, 2 races in May which includes my first triathlon of the season, 4 races in June which incorporate a “long sprint” triathlon and an Olympic distance one just two weeks apart from each other, and 3 races in July with one of them being the New York Aquaphor Olympic distance triathlon.  That’s 13 races in 5 months, and I still have more I have to register for to gain guaranteed entry to the 2014 NY Marathon.

I stare at the computer screen, and I am completely flummoxed.  What was I thinking?  I picture all these races, me trailing behind everyone, unable to finish some.  I’m suddenly knocked out of my day-nightmaring, though, by my husband, Wil.  He asks when I’m going to start my workout.  I say I’m waiting for the sun to come up.  He looks out the window into the blinding sun and says, “The sun couldn’t be any more up.  Get going.”

He’s right.  If I’m going to do all these races, I better keep training for them. First I go into my basement and use my resistance bands for about 40 minutes.  Then I come back upstairs and put on about 17 layers of clothing while muttering to myself something about it being March and me being annoyed that I’m still running in the cold.  I’m not sure, though.  I wasn’t even listening to myself. 

Finally, I step out of my house and commence my 6 mile run.  I start off pretty fast, and when I get to the one mile mark, I look at my watch and realize that I’m actually at a much better pace than I have been recently.  In other words, I’ve gone from sloth-like to slow, but at least it’s better.  Hmm, maybe all this work really is paying off.

During my run I think about all these races, and how I have no business doing them.  I’m old, I’m slow, and I am freakishly uncoordinated.  Thanks to my groovy new GPS watch, I learn I’ve just finished my second mile and it was a tad faster than the first one.  But then I think it’s a fluke, that by mile three I’ll be as slow as a brick wall again, and my average pace will be back to where it has been.

I continue along, and in what feels like very little time, my watch beeps to let me know I’ve completed a third mile.  As I go to turn around and head home, I start to laugh.  On my 6 mile run, I have two big hills that I have fondly named “That [expletive] Hill” and “That Other [expletive] Hill”.  When I first started running almost 4 years ago, I had to walk up those hills.  And today while I was busy telling myself that I was slow and incompetent, I ran up both of them without really paying attention to them.

I run home and look at my watch.  My overall time was better than it has been.  Not by enough to get me on Sport Center’s Top 10 Plays of the Week, but fast enough to make me happy.

I step back into the house and find my kids making “experiments” (i.e. a mess) in the kitchen and Wil, “watching” them (i.e. dead asleep on the couch).  Wil wakes up when he hears me and looks confused.  Then he looks at the clock and says, “Why are you back so soon?”  I know he’s not talking about the mere 10 seconds per mile I shaved off my pace, so I say, “My run was only 6 miles today.”  His reply: “Oh, that’s all?”  Then we both pause for a second and start to laugh.  In my world of all this training and all these races, 6 miles has become short, almost a non-workout.  As Wil goes to clean up the “experiments” in the kitchen, I walk back to my laptop and look at my Excel spreadsheet again.  13 races in 5 months, and that’s not even all of them.  Yeah, I got this.