Day 26 Just 99 days left!

On my training schedule, today is listed as a “rest day.”

Actually, my “rest days” would be more appropriately called “catch up days,” because I end up packing in everything, an effort that I should call “no task left behind.”  By the end of a “rest day,” I am ready to go back to marathon training.  It is a lot easier.

Today I am “comforted” that there are ONLY 99 days of training left until the marathon.  It is kind of like the Christmas decorations that I began to see in the stores this August.  In some ways, it makes me think, “oh, you have plenty of time to train.”  And in another urgent way, “oh, I have a lot of miles yet to cover.”  The paths near our house right now are stampeded each weekend with runners training for the Chicago marathon, now just about 6 weeks away.  They are in the midst of their hardest part of training.  I saw TRUE LOVE spelled out in capital letters last weekend when I met on the path a man named Mario who was running SIXTEEN miles that day with his wife Paula who was training for Chicago, her very first marathon.  I am sure that there were a lot of things that Mario would rather be doing, but there he was at his wife’s side, running at a pace that was not his own, and sweating it out for his beloved.  It still makes me smile.