There have been times in Horvath's running career when he felt the need to run 25 miles on the 25th of December. It's a special day, of course, but Dan also enjoys having the roads - even the main ones - almost entirely to himself, since traffic volume is as low as it gets on Christmas morning. Some of these long Christmas Day runs were quite memorable. Today would not be one of them.
Yesterday's race was only a five-miler, but even shorter races take their toll on Horvath these days. Add to this the overall mileage and dearth of days off, To top that off, Horvath has the Brunswick Marathon on the horizon. The only-five-day-away horizon. Now, you have a recipe for a not-so-great run.
Horvath is out of bed early like usual, but the coffee doesn't do its job as well as he'd like. He'd been thinking of doing some kind of special run on this special day, but now he is starting later and is also running slower than he'd hoped. There is a time constraint: the Grandkids will be opening their presents around 7:30. The run will have to be completed by 7.
As expected, the roads are indeed deserted. It's nice to have everything so quiet. Horvath doesn't get very far. He understands that he's just not going to have any kind of speed today. He calls it quits at 7:00 straight-up, and his watch informs him that he ran 4.99 miles.
Irony of ironies, the kids had awoken and opened their presents already by this time. Maybe Horvath should just go back to bed.
1 comment:
I was telling my wife the other day that Christmas is my favorite day of year to run. We have the world to ourselves out there.
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