November thoughts

Say. You know how you are awoken by something that will not go away if you ignore it?

On that spectrum is, perhaps, a room that got too cold because of an open window. You get up and close it, right? Maybe Christian is crying, because he rotated in bed so many times that he ended up with his head hanging over the edge. You pull him back up and cover him with a blanket.

Mattias may cry and you have to find a pacifier or maybe even sing a few bars while stroking his fat face and covering his eyes with the corner of a blanket.

Maybe you are in a tent and you didn't put the rain fly on. It rains; you have to get up and fix it.

Forget all of the above. I was deep into some dream last night, when I was awoken by the sound of someone gagging, followed by... vomit hitting me in the face!

There is Christian, stricken by the evil stomach bug that has tormented the family of late. He sits up, spews his contents on the pillow right next to my head and I am awoken by the lukewarm spray of last night's dinner.

For that, one has to get up quick and tend to his final hurling efforts. One has to strip the bed down, find new sheets and new covers for pillows and duvets. You scrub the floor half-heartedly, thinking you will do it right in the morning. Then you have to comfort Christian and get him to sleep, while telling him about the beaches of Florida and Mallorca.

I tell him the sharks are only in the deep water, and that he needn't worry about them. Finally he falls asleep.

He wakes up at 4:45 am, completely rejuvenated after a day of being sick. He pulls my face to make sure I understand that crocodiles also live in deep water, and that they don't bite people on the beach. I have to get up, fix him breakfast and put a movie on the DVD.

Damn kids. And yet I feel desperate, when I think about how fast they are growing. It's a realization that life may never get better than this; that a million things could go wrong and, even if they don't, things will slip away by default.

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I'm getting into running again. After a few slow uninspired weeks, I rediscovered the treadmill. The machines at our gym are not as smooth as the ones at the La Crosse YMCA, but just getting back on the belt has motivated me. At this point, I am doing long intervals, say 3 x 2 miles. The 2 miles are run basically all out, but I vary the grade from 0% to 5% and back down. Even at the end of a session, I am amazed at how fast I feel when the grade comes back down.

These types of workouts were my training backbone last winter (and spring, until the trails opened up). I PRd three times this year (5K, marathon and 50K), so I'm following the same formula. My achilles heel is mileage. I run such a pitiful number of miles a week (maybe 25?) that upping my mileage is a logical step. But somehow I can't, especially not in winter, when it's dark out. I don't have a group, or even a single running partner (except for the Girl, and she reliably hates me after an hour of running).

The Girl runs 80 miles a week, often with 2 slow marathons. She needs speed, I need mileage.

A few years back, I tried running LSD with spanish lessons on the iPod. Maybe I will try that again.