Conundrum One

A year in advance, and it’s time to analyze some options and make a decision…

The marathon I was starting to eyeball for next July, the San Francisco Marathon, has released its event date, and it falls on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008. Ten days after my 30th birthday.

This, of course, poses a potential problem. I’d sort of “unofficially selected” the San Francisco event since it presented the largest option out of all the July marathon events… and that means it has the potential to be better organized, better attended, and better stocked with fluid stations and such along the way. Plus, more runners would be there, which would help me hide my tears of immense pain amongst a throng of strangers.

The other options felt more like it’d be me, crying alone in a field full of moose. And that’s happened far too many times in my life for my tastes.

I’m kidding.

It’s only happened twice.

Ahem.

So I have to weigh my options again, and determine how badly I want to pull off that part of this year before the actual birthday and whether or not I can give it a 10-day reprieve. I’m leaning right now towards finding a race within the July-to-July timeframe here, but that means my next best bet is probably the Calgary Marathon.

And there are serious moose in Calgary.

A tough part of the challenge of the next 12 months isn’t going to be my organizational skills, of which I brag incessantly and tout repeatedly via multiple To Do lists and page after page of plans. Instead, the ravages of time are going to be the toughest battle from sunrise to sunset each and every day.

Staying motivated is one part, but fitting said motivation to check off every To Do item in three hours before you’re allowed to downgrade to a slower speed is the heavier task.

I found this to be wholly self-evident yesterday, when I had intended to play basketball, straighten up my apartment, do dishes, clean my shower, cook a brand-new meal I’ve never tried before, do laundry, AND go into work for a few hours to finish up a project that was thrust on top at the last minute for this coming week. I had these lofty goals and the secret ambition to read and get some writing done all on tap for the day’s work, and when the dust settled… the results weren’t as fascinating as their expectation.

I straightened up in the morning, then went into work for a few hours. The humidity in D.C. was such that I wasn’t a pretty sight by my arrival downtown, but five hours or so later all was wrapped up there.

With that deadline-oriented task out of the way, I marched home and…

And…

And didn’t accomplish very much. I rationalized away a Sunday workout, and the three hours laundry would most likely have taken with the laundry room back-up. Before long the shower cleaning slipped away and I settled on cooking dinner and doing the dishes.

My day was a “Just Barely Over 50 Percent” day. And as I’m expecting, being just over fifty percent isn’t going to get me one hundred percent of where I want to be.

But tick tock, tick tock.