More About This Later

Welcome! to your weekly bitchfest.

I've been promising myself that I would write about my reasons for running this marathon, just to get really clear. Which they haven't been so much.

But on Saturday's run—and in fact, the entire week leading up to Saturday's run—one of my goals got crystal clear: I wanted to be the kind of girl who belongs to a big, fun, relaxed group of people pursuing a common passion. Like, um, say, running a marathon, for instance.

Everyone I'd met who did this training said, oh you'll have so much fun with your Group. The staff at the info session back in cold, bleak, dark February held out Group bonding as an incentive to get people to sign up. (And apparently, it worked.) Bloggers raved about how they'd found lifelong friends. Some even posted Group photos pre-, during, and post-Saturday morning runs (p.s. those are shots of the actual training site I run at on Saturday mornings. Cool, huh?).

And in the 7 gazillion Galloway articles and books I read, he never failed to rhapsodize about the power of the Group.

So, here I am, it's week 11170^th and do I have a group? I do not.

The first pace group I was put in sort of fell apart.

I tried another, slower group the next week, let's call them "pace group 'B.'" But when I had to stop and pee (yep, that word again), off they went. By then I had met the Divine Miz M, and she ran with me, and waited for me while I attended to those sorts of things. PGB was not into waiting; well let's just say if you dropped dead on a run, I'm pretty sure they'd step over you. (Ooh that's harsh.)

So, I spent the next few weeks running with Divine. We have a grand time running together, but we have different paces. Plus, I was worried (what me, worry?) that I was becoming dependent on her. If one of us got injured, or ill, we'd be screwed. And I wanted a freakin' Group already...

So last Saturday I decided to give PGB another try, even if it meant not running with Divine (and thank god she is not the drama queen that I am, so she completely understood). So, off I went with PGB.

Now B's pace leader (as in the "one who sets the pace") refuses to set the pace, instead letting the fastest runner set the pace. Apparently all 10 people in this group agree with her, because I talked with pretty much all of them, until I'm sure they were ready to slap me silly to shut me up, about the point of sticking with the pace your group is assigned. One of them finally told me "hey, you really aren't gonna be able to get 10 people to do what you want them to do."

She had me there.

PGB trains this way: they charge out hard and fast, and die on the way back, like it's a race.

And they did this on Saturday despite being specifically told by our coaches that day to add a minute to our pace. Instead, I think they took 3 minutes off (for the first few miles).

So the long and the short of it is: I don't have a fun group, I'm not in synch with them, I'm not gonna bond with these people, even though I'm sure they're perfectly nice, I did run 16 miles with them and came out fine, I know what they're doing is dumb, and well, i I'm not sure what exactly to do about it. And yeah, I already talked with the coaches, who pretty much shrugged. I mean, really what can they do? We're all grown-ups.

And yeah, I know 40 kazillion people will be running the marathon, so I'm sure i'll find plenty of people to talk with and pass the time with, but ya know what? I'm just disappointed. Which sucks, because I just ran 16 miles! So I have nothing to be disappointed about!

In church Sunday, our priest talked about the "Melodrama of the Self."

So that's what this is, probably in spades. Everyone is happy but me, and I'm gonna go eat worms and die.

Like I said, we're all grown-ups.