In the Middle.

We're about 7 weeks away from the race now and I've started to have a bit of fatigue.  The training regime is long, repetitive, time-consuming and can be as difficult to endure as the actual race itself.  True, no one day of training is as hard as the full marathon, but the sum of a few weeks can be.  I'm doing my best to run 4 days a week which means being up early to run before work even in bad weather, scheduling evening runs around late in the day work meetings and deadlines, keeping a low profile on Friday night, and then being up early on Saturday for the long run.  Of course after that your day is often shot by the recovery from the run, though somehow I don't nap Saturday afternoons like a lot of my fellow runners do, but there have been days when I'd like to. 

I'm not trying to complain about all this, having done this once before I knew it going in, but its still not that easy to deal with.  I'm a flexible enough person that I can come up with a new running plan when an unexpected social or work event conflicts with an already planned run.  Alumni lecture Thursday night during Crossroads?  No problem, I can run in the morning, or do a shorter run Friday morning.  Planning like that becomes hard when the truly unexpected occurs.  Like, what if the alumni lecture puts your run off to Friday morning and then you oversleep, and then that afternoon a family medical emergency takes you to Rochester?  

Well, it means that you drive to Rochester, skip the 18-mile run on Saturday so you can go see your Mom in the hospital, and then pull an 8-mile run on Sunday so that you stay in some sort of condition.  Training is important but family is even more important.  It's hard to see your Mother in the ICU, and a run after that does help vent a lot of the nervous energy that builds up from it.  

The story goes like this, about 30 years ago Mom had Hodgkin's disease and the first treatment they tried was radiation which inadvertently damaged her left lung.  Recently this has caused her to have some pulmonary hypertension which makes lethargic at times and they've been using oxygen therapy to treat.  Last weekend she was hardly awake at all and my Dad took her to the hospital and she was admitted on Monday.  It sounded then like she might not be there long, but Thursday they admitted her to the ICU and intubated her that night.  I had been thinking of heading out to be with my family all week and the intubation was the last straw, so Molly and I drove here Friday and saw Mom at the hospital Saturday morning.  

There hasn't been much of change since then, her blood gases are acceptable and she's mostly breathing on her own, but she's still sedated and on the tube until they get some other things worked out, which means that we're sitting in the room with her and waiting for things to change.  It's been a hard two days of waiting and I have no idea how my Dad did it for the whole week, let alone for 3 years back in the 70s.  Our jobs are being very understanding and so we'll be waiting with her for another few days I guess.  I'll try to work another run in I think, but we'll see.  Like I said, training is less important than family, but I still have 7 weeks and have been doing well so far, so if this is a short interruption of my training than I should be fine.  So, tomorrow it's back to the waiting.