One silly little mile to keep from breaking the streak

I spent the morning at church, and the midday cleaning the house, and then Rick and Tim left for an away baseball game. Holly and I hadn’t made plans to get together with anyone else and my parents were out for the day and therefore unavailable to look after Holly, so I had to wait for Rick and Tim to get home before I could go running.

But when they got home it was 6:30 and everyone wanted dinner – and dinner was exactly ready to come out of the oven, so I chose in favor of a family sit-down dinner rather than a “You guys eat while I go running” event. It didn’t actually turn out to be a family sit-down dinner because Tim teased Holly, Holly flogged Tim with her blanket, I scolded her, and she ran upstairs and slammed her door. So it was only a three-quarters family dinner. I didn’t go after Holly because, as Rick pointed out, she did something she’s not allowed to do – she tries to tell us that hitting Tim with a blanket isn’t the same as hitting, but we’ve argued that yes, in fact, it is – but then effectively sent herself to her room, so there was no point in urging her to come out when she was where we would have put her anyway.

So the three of us had dinner, and it was getting a little dusky as we finished so I said to Rick that I was going to hurry out before dark. Just then Holly reappeared in the kitchen, calm, contrite and hungry, so I reheated her enchilada and told her she could eat while Rick washed dishes and I went running.

But then Rick finished washing the dishes and Holly accidentally knocked her plate on the floor, where it shattered. So I halted what I was doing – lacing my running shoes – and came back to clean up the mess and heat up another enchilada for Holly. Given the porcelain shards, saving the clean-up for later didn’t seem like a safe option. By the time I was done cleaning up and Holly had a newly warmed dinner, it was fully dark.

“Guess it’ll be just a mile,” I sighed to myself and the dog, and out we went for our skinny little 11-minute run, one mile exactly, down the footpath and back, in the dark, headlamp on. I was frustrated because I feel like weekends are supposed to be my time for longer-distance running, and today it just hadn’t worked at all: I was logging one silly mile, the bare-minimum distance allowed by the USRSA for streak runners to maintain their status.

But then I reminded myself that I should be proud to have gotten out at all. This was, after all, the kind of day that at an earlier time would have dissuaded me from trying to do a running streak. I would have said, “But sometimes I just can’t get out before dark, like if Rick isn’t home and I don’t have anyone else to look after Holly. It wouldn’t be practical to try to run every single day.” Yes, I did only a mile today, but the goal is to get out for at least a mile every day, and I upheld that goal. Maybe I can find a day during the upcoming week to do some extra distance, replacing today’s run. I’m not starting the week with a big pile-up of assignments and the weather is predicted to be beautiful for the next several days, so I’ll just break with routine and do a longer run early this week.