Watch Greg Run began as an online journal of my effort to run a marathon each month during 2009. With the marathon a month challenge successfully behind me, I'm still running and still posting with notes on training runs, travel and other thoughts.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Thursday--2.5 Days to the Race

It's Thursday (check the post title if confused), which finds me back home in Birmingham after five nights in various hotels and meeting rooms.

While it's nice to be home, I am typing from a Starbucks prior to driving to Anniston, Alabama for a high school football game. For those not versed in motor sports and Alabama culture, this weekend is the fall NASCAR race at Talladega SuperSpeedway (why build a speedway when you can build a superspeedway). Since Talladega is between Birmingham and Anniston, and race weekend traffic makes it difficult to get around, the Briarwood at Anniston game was moved from Friday to Thursday.

For pictures of Talladega and a post from a half marathon I ran on the track back in April, see http://watchgregrun.blogspot.com/2009_04_16_archive.html.

FYI, the theme from Shaft is now playing at Starbucks.

The net result for today is I returned home mid-afternoon, unpacked from five days away and repacked for may marathon trip to New York. Moving ahead to my Friday plans, I will leave right after work on Friday afternoon for the drive to Atlanta (this was a great plan when the football game was on Friday...leave work...drive to the high school football game...leave the football game...rather than return home just drive to Atlanta since Anniston is half way there (livin' on a prayer)...stay the night at an airport hotel...fly from ATL to LaGuardia early Saturday morning...yada...yada...yada...run Sunday morning). Alas, the best laid plans of me were interrupted by a combination of NASCAR and high school football. Of all the monkey wrenches that could have been tossed in to my plans, I did not see that one coming.

As for the running, this morning began for me on a pretty fall day in Indianapolis with running three very easy miles. Just enough to get the blood pumping, allow for some post run stretching and let my mind think I'm still doing something to prepare my body for 26.2 miles.

Without divulging the source at the moment, early today I happened to read the following:

Since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.

If you think about the picture painted in words by the author, one might think the comments related to Sunday's marathon. A huge crowd gathered to watch, people wearing minimal shorts and t-shirts, rather than sin it might flab that traps us, and we will have the need to run with endurance (rather than hopes or dreams) the course set before us by the race director.

Interesting the paragraph is slightly less then 2,000 years old having appeared in the New Testament book of Hebrews. While I could easily craft this into a runner's translation, rather than what is captured from the New Living Translation, I'll just let the author's words speak for themselves. (link: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews%2012&version=NLT)

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