October 14, 2016
I sent a text to my mom and brother upon landing in North Carolina. It read:
I’ve been in a real melancholy due to the above. I’ve done some awesome things but feel like I’ve let down some people along the way and haven’t been much fun to be around for long stretches.
I recently had lunch with a mentor and friend and briefly mentioned feeling my age and the passage of time. Vicky mentioned her fiancé soon to be husband is a big triathlon guy and views birthdays only as an age bracket. It was funny to hear as that’s the reason I’ll be able to run Boston next year.
By the same token, the looming birthday does bump me up an age bracket. It also somehow feels like I should be somewhere else in life. I’m not sure what that means, whether it’s a feeling of not keeping up with the Joneses, or a realization that I took certain paths and made certain choices and by no means were they wrong but there’s a sense that the other options may not have been wrong either. Isn’t that really what the road not taken is actually about? That one winds up roughly in the same place? I feel like there was a big kerfuffle about that, that we the masses were missing the meaning, the same way everybody seems to think Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” is super patriotic.
Feeling out of sorts as me, it is perhaps then ideal that tomorrow I will be running as … HIM.
The packet pickup today at Omega Sports in Greensboro was very small… the “expo” laughably smaller albeit they said there’d be more vendors after 4 pm. I wasn’t surprised once I heard the field size. Seven hundred in total, 300 for the half, 300 for the 5k and 100 for the full marathon.
I chatted with a nice woman from town who told me there was a tough hill at mile 20 and then another at 25. That’s some crazy course design but so be it. HE can do it.
I spent the afternoon wandering through the Roadside America listings for G-Boro.
The statue for local short story legend O. Henry afforded a few choice facebook posts:
A few notes… what if it was about two “roommates” and one has a rubber ducky and the other has a paperclip collection…
I was too cheap to pay the $12 admission to the Civil Rights Museum at the old Woolworths, site of the famed February 1, 1960 counter sit in.
I debated about dinner options. I briefly considered the giant mech robot adorned Burger Warfare. But the warnings of realistic artillery fire as one eats made me wince.
Instead I wound up at Ghassan’s, an established 1975 family owned Triad chain. The carrots make it healthy, right?
And now like so many Cannonballers before, I await the dawn.
Duhn-duhn-DUUUUUUUUUHN!