You never regret a run

Yesterday, I had the best of intentions. I woke up at 5 AM to run. Bleary-eyed, I staggered around the room, weighing my options, and ultimately, I decided to go back to bed. I haven't been sleeping well; every hour of sleep I can manage is precious to me. I'll run at lunch, I thought.

Lunchtime came, and my day up to that point had been so stressful that all I wanted to do was get out of the office and gorge myself on something fried. So rather than run, I went to a Japanese restaurant and filled up on pork katsu.  Looking back, rather than self-medicating on pig, I obviously should have self-medicated with a run. I can be dumb sometimes. But I told myself that I would run at my daughter's cross-country practice. I believed the lie.

Well, friends, my daughter was at the grandparents' house, and my wife went there in the afternoon to pick her up when a complication arose. My in-laws were grilling barbecue ribs. Ribs are my #1 trigger food. I am utterly incapable of resisting them.  Wifey called and asked whether or not I wanted to go out there after work and have some. Like a puppet on a string, I drove out there and stuffed myself with pig again and talked and talked, and before you can say arteriosclerosis, the time for cross-country had come and gone. 

I know what you are thinking because I said it to myself about a dozen times yesterday. The moral of my story is that I should have run when I had a chance, first thing in the morning. I would have started my day on a positive note. The exercise would have put me in a frame of mind other than "ticking time bomb." Plus, I wouldn't have been looking in vain for a slot to jam a 20-minute run into.

I didn't reproduce yesterday's error today. I produced a whole new error, sort of. So eager was I to leave work yesterday, I left my gym bag containing a set of running clothes, my Nikes, my Vibrams, and my Garmin. In the past, this would have been enough of an inconvenience to justify blowing off yet another day of running. But I was determined to run no matter what. I threw on a shirt and a pair of shorts and ran two miles totally barefoot. It was great. I know I shouldn't have run such a distance barefoot without building up properly, but I regret nothing.  It's been the highlight of my day so far.  It reminds me of the old runner's saying, which I will now butcher.

You never regret a run. You always regret the runs you blow off.