Race Time

I have this idea that if I plan ahead in the increments that it takes to train for a half-marathon, I can control where I’ll end up by race day.

This spring, I trained for the Brooklyn Half-Marathon and planned to finish my book around the same time. It worked. For about a week, I was very pleased with my time and the version of the book I showed around. But then whatever happiness I felt from the race and completing what amounted to a strong first draft faded away after about a week.

So I tried to do the same thing for the Hamptons half-marathon, which is Saturday. When I signed up, I was frustrated with my writing, hating the way the heat made running so hard, and hoping that a bunch of friends would do the race and we’d be able to make a Hamptons weekend out of it.

The race is Saturday, and not everything has turned out the way I hoped. Writing is still difficult, I didn’t train enough and none of my friends are doing the race. That said, I’m still writing every day, I continued to run through the heat and humidity of the hottest summer on record, and my brother and a cousin are doing the 5k. Besides, I ended up having a Hamptons weekend earlier in the summer.

All this is to say that time passes. Which is a duh thing, but in this age without graduations and due dates, it’s hard to tell what has happened in five months.

I’m not sure how I’ll do on Saturday. Like I said, the summer hasn’t really unfolded the way I had hoped and I didn’t train as much as I should have. But Saturday is still October 2, just the way it was a few months ago.

And anyway, didn’t it seem like Fall was just going to happen after Labor Day? It started getting cool and the air had the smell of decaying leaves and changing weather patterns. And then it got hot again in this sort of unpleasant, I was ready to wear flannel again way. I know it’ll cool off eventually. By February, I’ll wish it was warm enough for bug bites. And by then, I’ll probably be training for another race.