It has dawned on me today that I am not taking tomorrow’s half marathon seriously. What caused me to realize this? Hmmm, let’s see. Maybe the total lack of training runs. Or when it dawned on me I have barely been drinking anything lately, much less adding extra hydration. (I am currently chugging water as I write this). I hadn’t even thought about refueling, luckily I found some sport beans buried in my running gear. And I won’t even mention my diet this week other than to say it was probably the exact opposite of what it should have been. Even Mother Nature isn’t going to give me a hand on this run; a couple of degrees above zero and rain.

I do know why this has happened, beyond the obvious factor of pure laziness. Running the marathon has skewed my understanding of running reality. In my head I was just thinking of tomorrow as a short run. Wake up call! It is still 21.1km. And for this course it is 21 km of small rolling hills! I could be the poster child of poor training.

So I have decided that tomorrow will be a running experiment. I am going to see how much poor preparation can affect my run. Just how many more minutes can I tack onto my half marathon due to stupidity? Fifteen, twenty, thirty? At what point in the run (I can’t in good conscious call this a race) will I realize I am fading and fading fast? I am putting my money on the 12k mark. Then again that might be giving myself too much credit.

When running a race my son repeats to himself, “Bagels, bagels, bagels.” I don’t think he would ever mind if a race ran out of medals, but look out if they run out of food! So tomorrow I will borrow his technique and repeat “Brunch, brunch, brunch.” Thankfully the Mission Possible race includes a brunch at the club house. Hopefully the thought of a hot brunch will be enough to get me to the finish line.