Long Run #1: Midnight, Moon

Trust me.

It isn't good, in the first week of a marathon training plan, to find yourself on Sunday night at 11:30, seated at kitchen table with feet up, eating a frozen fudge bar, legs slightly numb from biking 20 miles (up and over none other than the Newton hills) earlier in the evening, IMing with a boy on vacation in California who thinks running for the sake of running is a study in pointlessness, not having run your weekly long run yet, feeling a trapping sort of guilt.

Your choices are:

a) Sleep.  (Which you'd kind of rather and which your boss, expecting you at the office the following morning, would probably really you rather.)

b) Continue chatting.  (Which, considering you've just hit a couple sarcastic zingers at the expense of HBI, you'd most certainly rather.) 

c)  Get your f#$%ing shoes on and subsume the guilt into adrenaline.

(That's a marathon training plan for you:  not empathetic to a girl's need for flirtation.  Additionally, it has this habit of adding mileage and difficulty over 18 weeks, rubbing your nose in it if you dare drop pace.)

So, yeah.

Seven miles at midnight isn't as hard as it sounds.  Not on the night of a full moon. Not at cloudless and 72 degrees, slight breeze.  The city sleeping as you jog over the Fort Point Channel, waving at buddies holding up the bar at Foley's, up Tremont past City Hall and MGH and TD Garden and onto the Rose Kennedy Greenway, crossing the channel again to pick up D Street at the World Trade Center, taking D to West Second to home, clocking 65 minutes with an uphill sprint the last 2 blocks.

Woo-hoo!

(A.k.a.:  you have chosen .... wisely.)