Your Body, No Your Body

My neighbor and I ran a trial marathon today in the park across the street from our neighborhood.  We're six weeks out from the first of two marathons we've signed up for but I suppose we just wanted to make sure we were ready for them.    It appears we are.

When you run with someone beside you for five hours—if you're doing pace math, that's slow—you have a lot of time to talk about lots of things.    Today we coincidentally ran into my neighbor as she was heading out for a run and ran along with her for a few miles.   We later happened upon another neighbor who is the mother to three children who sit for all of our children.   We ran with her for three miles or so and then she split off.     But we still had twenty-ish miles to talk.

We have never run out of things to talk about.   The only time there is danger of that is when one of us is bonking so badly we can't think straight enough to talk—which has happened.   Today among all the things we got to talking about was things we disliked about our bodies.    It's normal to have parts or areas of your body that you don't mind and then other areas you wish were different in some way.

As she and I were talking, we both kept scoffing at the other's comments.   "What do you mean you don't like your thighs?  You have great looking thighs!"   Or, "your upper arms don't look flabby, they look muscular and defined!"   There was a lot of this going on.   Eventually, we both had to laugh because we decided we'd each be much happier with the other's body because we just couldn't see what the other was unsatisfied about.

The Big Boy Update:   First Circus.   We took both children to the circus for the first time today.   My son loved it. He loved the sights and sounds.  He was fascinated with the animals and the acrobats.   He loved the motorcycles that spun around in the big metal sphere.    As we were leaving, he wanted to do some acrobatics on the metal bike rack.   I asked him if we should put up the trapeze on the swing set so he could practice and he said yes.   He was working hard on doing some hanging upside down move when it got dark and he had to go in for dinner.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Sleepy Circus.   My daughter went to the circus for the first time today as well.   She liked everything, although it was loud.   She would do a dance from time to time with her arms when there were dancers dancing and she clapped at just the right spots.    She got tired after intermission though and fell asleep across both me and her chair, face down on the seat.  

Fitness Update:  We ran our marathon trial run today.   I ended at the longest run I've ever done by adding one extra tenth onto my prior max distance and came in at 26.4 miles.