Ramblings of a Runner

If you haven't yet figured it out from the timestamps on my previous posts, I am a Night Person.  Especially of late.  My Bio-Rhythms seem to be thrown off six ways from Sunday and I am presently pillaging my way through a package of Oreos (as there is not much else to do at eleven thirty on a Monday night), telling myself that I'll jumpstart my diet in the morning, calling this a carb-load for my theoretical training run tomorrow versus what it actually is: my slow decline toward a tractor hauling me out of my house through a hole in the wall.  I seem to be walking a knife's edge this month between my marathoner self and some sort of portly pasta making Italian grandmother just dying to get out and take over...

Not sure when I traded in my CamelBack for the cookies, but I chalk it up to all the feelings there are to stuff these days; It's a mad mad mad mad world, as they say, and it aint gettin glad anytime soon as far as I can tell...Add to that each person's personal pile of poo and you've got a recipe for - ooh, chocolate chip cookies!! - um, yeah, I'd say I've fallen off the wagon pretty good this time...hurled myself off is more like it. 

"It's not what you're eating, it's what's eating YOU," a friend told me the last time I fell off the wagon, rolled down the hill, and ended up in a carb-laden lump at the bottom.  "...what's eating me..." hmmm, could be a small village for all I know; at the rate my little midnight munchfest is going there's certainly going to be enough of me to go around..."Just doing my little part to make a dent in world hunger!"...which would make up for my making a pretty serious dent in the world's food supply.

As it stands I have exactly six months and seventeen days to prepare for a half-marathon I signed up for to fend off the foodie within...A sort of carrot on the end of the stick for me to chase (quite literally) through twenty degree Winter weather and rainy Spring mornings till the big day arrives (If it were an Oreo and not a carrot, I'm fairly sure I'd run faster and farther, but I was not around when said simile was authored, so there it is, and here I am, perpetually persuading myself that this "carrot" is indeed worth the effort.)

So I have within me, daily dueling for my devotion, the Glutton and the Runner...The gratification of giving way to the Glutton is ephemeral at best and always ends in self-loathing and lethargy lording over me, whereas rendering to the Runner its due respect yields a bounty of boundless energy, tremendous self-satisfaction, and certainly serves an an affront to aforementioned tractor/hole-in-wall scenario.

So why the debate?  The answer is obvious: The Runner should win hands down every time, n'est pas?  But no, au contraire mon amis, (dang, now I want a croissant...) the gravitational pull of the Glutton remains, and half the time I feel like a dam holding back a huge body of water - er, well, maybe just a huge body - just waiting to spill out and change the landscape of my life.

As it stands, the dam is holding, despite the thousands of calories I just threw down my gullet, and my running schedule remains, hanging dutifully on my fridge, like a sentry ceremonially guarding the frozen fortress of food...

...mainly against me.