Boys Just Wanna Have Fun

This morning I did something I never do anymore. I slept in. Until 7:00 o'clock.

No, I'm not a morning person. Far from it. But Fri day is My day and I tend to rise with my wife, who has to work- hee hee- and begin the joys of playing with the cats, drinking coffee, and planning the day. And blog. Often I blog.

2w3eghtf9oi0p  Baby Kitty just walked across my key pad.

I need another cup of coffee. Hydration. I  have plans, big plans.

I made them last night, the plans, and they perfectly illustrate the tension I have been living with for years now. Remember my sob story after the Oaks? I need to work on speed all year and come back next time with a faster 10K. I also need to be working on my bike because I have the same kind of come-to-Jesus meeting with myself after the Heart O' Dixie Triathlon every year. But what I almost always do is capitulate to pleasure in place of interval training.

I would be well served to go out and hammer myself with a vV02 max session. Instead, I hatched the plot to drive my truck to Malaison Road and take a long, slow, run just for fun. No time or distance goals just shuffle along and listen to the birds sing if I can hear over the huffs and pantings of my middle-aged lungs. Malmaison Road is a gravel thing that peels off Highway 7 just north of Greenwood and runs into Carroll County, up the hill, and on to Highway 35. Once it was the address of Greenwood Leflore's home, Malmaison, hence the name. Leflore was the last chief of the Choctaws, my people, who, after selling his people off to Oklahoma and a little stroll called the Trail of Tears, bequethed to the town and county its name .

Allegedly I had an ancestor who was a beneficiary of Leflore's treaty making and took the trip out West. He, I am told, could pass, and after surviving the Trail walked back to Mississippi and married a white woman. I also had a great-great grandfather who was abandoned in Utah, and although he was only a boy of twelve, he walked back to Mississippi only to be abandoned again. An uncle of mine did the Bataan Death March. This long slow distance stuff is in my genes. Literally.

The amazing thing is how little I have used this road. It is a jewel and only seven miles from my driveway. A couple of years back, I started driving out there, parking by a church, and running the road on afternoons after school. Then, for reasons unknown to myself even, I stopped. Last night, I had that restlessness inside. It strikes every now and then and when it does, I have to do something. I have to come up with a plan. I thought and thought and thought trying to come up with some kind of mildly adventurous run. Several possibilities passed through my thoughts, but I settled on Malaison. I want to shuffle out of Leflore County, up the hill and just go until I get tired. Then I will turn around and shuffle back to my truck.

What this run will accomplish is to add a little to my low-end endurance but it will do nothing to add the my 5K or 10 K speed. Neither will it aid my efforts at next year's Heart O' Dixie Triathlon or even help me in my Swim the Suck race against Randy Beets, which is coming up in only a week. It will, however, help me have fun, and I think that is important. I suppose that is my philosophy of exercise: fun. If one is having fun, one is continuing. If one is to achieve health, in part through exercise, one must have continue. I will only torture myself for so long before I find a way to have some fun.

I'll let you know how it turns out.