Scheduled for Delivery

Remember collecting Popsicle wrappers as a kid, saving them up until you had hundreds of them, and then mailing them in for a prize? That's how training is. Building up a big pile by adding a little bit to it day after day after day after day. (Or as John L. Parker Jr. puts it in Once a Runner, "knotting his loathsome smelling laces for yet another, jesus god, ten-miler with the boys".)

My pile of training is complete, and now I anxiously wait for my prize to arrive. I put on my postage stamp called taper, and let the whole thing go. All I can do is have faith the prize will arrive in time. I'll know it's here when I feel it in my legs as a zing of flowing energy, and in my lungs as a surge of renewed power. And a walloping, enthusiastic, visceral need to just let me run run run run run! A lovely prize indeed.

Just please let it get here soon.