Last week in Surgeres, France at an invitation-only 48 Hour race around a 300m track, Ryoichi Sekiya and Sumie Inagaki, both from Japan, ran 407.966km and 397.103km respectively. In homage to their incredible endurance and the sheer force of will it must have taken to accomplish those numbers, tonight I will eat plentifully of the food of their homeland. We all contribute in different ways.
The road to excess leads to the place of wisdom, for we can never know what is enough until we have experienced too much.Getting very close now to Ultrabalaton, a 212km fun run around Lake Balaton in southern Hungary. We're running it as a four person relay team, with me likely taking an 80-85km night shift. Training has been going well, with weekends dedicated almost exclusively to relentless forward motion...sometimes long slow runs and sometimes long fast walks. Last weekend Deanna and I did about nine hours in our trusty sneakers, and look to hit ten hours on the paths this weekend. A few more weeks like that, then the taper as we take our long-anticipated ten day tour of Turkey with some friends from work, before arriving in Budapest on June 16th.
Unless a major classroom catastrophe is looming or it is report card time, I do a decent job of keeping work thoughts out of my running mind....I think a little coping mechanism those in the mental health know refer to as compartmentalization. I also happen to be Mr StoneFace and long ago stopped buying into the cuteness factor of the mini-humans. But as I sort out pictures for the yearbook and feel great after a weekend of running, I'll allow the twain to meet. Just this once.