Helpful running tip

When you've run 15 miles and it's just starting to settle in that holy shit this hurts and you're physically and emotionally drained and you still have to find the fortitude to get through five more miles before the I want to die NOW thoughts completely take over ... do NOT run by a rally for cancer survivors. Because you will LOSE. YOUR. SHIT. And it will take you at least half a mile to regain any semblance of composure.

So I did my longest pre-marathon run yesterday. I like to peak at 20 (for those of you who didn't put 15+5 together in the last paragraph) around four weeks before the marathon and then taper into the low teens until race day, which is for my increasingly slow self no longer a "race" but "race day" makes it sound like I'm some kind of athlete.

And my training group? As you may recall, it started out even bigger than this (we never got everyone together at once) last spring:

But after tons of injuries, a lot of summer-travel training disruptions, a few total losers dropouts and a handful of non-marathoners who were just running with us for fun so they had no reason to inflict 20 miles of personal injury on themselves, we were down to two of us yesterday. And since I'm a big slow behemoth of an old guy, the two of us stayed together for only four miles. So we ran the last 16 miles (I ran 16.5 because there was no damn sign at the 10-mile turnaround and my bajillion-dollar GPS running watch is about as accurate as a Glenn Beck opinion) on our own.

And that's probably good, because everything hurt so damn bad that I couldn't stop whimpering through the last three miles. And since I was whimpering in rhythm (step, step, step, unghh, step, step, step, unghh) I'm sure I was more irritating than ... well ... a Glenn Beck opinion.

But I somehow finished and I somehow got myself home and I somehow filled up the hot tub that 99% of the time we hate having because it's hard to keep clean ... and I somehow convinced myself there's nothing even remotely inappropriate about posting this picture of me soaking away the pain in whirling spearmint-scented bubbles: