Four Miles - Easy

INT. MODEST SUBURBAN HOME, KITCHEN – EARLY MORNING [7:30AM-ish]

RUDY is dressed and ready for work. He is busy making the family’s lunches in a short assembly-line fashion, i.e., bread-bread-bread, cheese-cheese-cheese, lunchmeat-lunchmeat-lunchmeat, wrap-wrap-wrap, bag-bag-bag, and so on.

D’KID is also dressed, but hardly ready for school. Her hair is a serious mess, resembling wildly grown shrubbery than a hairstyle. She sits at the kitchen table, deftly “schemer”-ing her toasted bagel with cream cheese.

D’WIFE enters, yawning. She comes up behind RUDY and hugs him.

D’WIFE
Did you run this morning?

RUDY
Yep

D’WIFE
How far?

RUDY
Westerby’s Farm. Just four miles. Easy

D’KID
Good job, dad

[REPEAT Scene as necessary, sometimes replacing “Westerby’s Farm” with “Atco Ave”]

****

That’s been my morning routing lately: Four Miles – Easy … sounds kinda boring, huh?

On paper, it is. My training log looks like a gappy blue picket fence of perfectly level slats. Even the pacing is just about the same day after day[mostly because I round my times off significantly]

Every run however is different, just as every wave is different. There are the changes in weather, naturally; but I mean more that just that.

Some days, as I’m stretching, I’ll have in my mind that I’m going to do one route, but when I get to the decision point, I’ll change my mind and do the other [or just forget where I was going HA!] Other days, I’ll stick with my plan and, almost as a reward, I’ll see or hear something I hadn’t noticed before.

There are internal, subconscious variations as well. My mind will wander in ways I hadn’t foreseen. The internal radio station [Noggin 101FM] might play one song at mile one on Monday, and another on Wednesday; even though the playlist on the iPod as I was doing my pre-run Punk-Yoga was exactly the same.

They say that Ben Hogan wasn’t allowed to play the same golf course two days in a row, because he was so consistent that his ball would land in the divot he’d struck the day before. I’m all for consistency, but it’s not like I’ll be putting my foot down in my own shoe-prints anytime soon.