Though there's something in the air this time.

Running long distances in the rain. Yeah, it pretty much sucks ass. Well, at least the idea of it pretty much sucks ass. Dragging your balls out of bed while it’s still dark out (and presumably cold), cursing the squawking alarm clock, and trying to psyche yourself up for the next hour (or two hours or three hours...) that you’ll spend out on the road, pounding the pavement, is hard enough as it is. Add a steady falling rain to the equation, and your body almost automatically shuts down and falls back into bed, comatose.

But you fend off the coma, choke down some cereal, tie up your sneakers, and head out into the storm. And for the first few seconds, holy shit does it suck. The air is cold; the rain makes it colder. A happy little breeze blows through your dampening hair, which, were you not already shivering, you’d probably be thrilled with. Breezes are usually a welcome addition to a run. But not this morning. Not this morning with its steady rain, and your nipples poking violently through your shirt, and your synthetic running shorts already soaked and sticking to your skin. Ah, chafing. Runner’s best friend.

And before you know it, you’re soaked through. And once that happens, well, you can’t get any wetter. So you forget about it. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel bad at all. In fact, it feels kind of...good. It’s almost as if having something out of the ordinary to distract you, or even something newly unpleasant to focus on (as opposed to the usual things that can conspire to make a run unpleasant: achy muscles, lack of motivation, negative thought patterns...) actually helps to keep you newly focused, keeping your usual running demons at bay.

This morning, despite waking up and cursing the rain (and its alliance with the cold and the dark), I had one of the best runs I’ve had in a long time. Mentally, this has been a hard week of training—maybe because I’ve known that if I really am going to run this marathon in November, this is the week where I really have to turn some things around. I’ve been having some trouble committing the way I need to. But this morning, after my run, I was like, “Huh. Maybe I can make this happen after all.” It felt good to force myself through the unpleasantness. And even better to realize how good I felt afterwards.

Not to mention the fact that, in my seemingly never-ending quest for self-sabotage, I came really close to getting stoned last night. Despite my swearing off of alcohol and all inhalants until post-marathon. Luckily, there was enough time between the discussion of the act and the act itself that I was able to clear my head and say to myself, “Um, dipshit, if you do that you’ll destroy your run in the morning. In fact, you probably won’t even wake up for it. And that will feel right shitty. And just when you’ve started to make some real progress...”

So I kicked my ass back to my place and quickly drifted off, sober and feeling good, happy to have made a healthy decision. The right decision. And this morning, as I’ve already indicated, I felt so good and was so happy to have done it. So much better than I would have felt waking up hung over, groggy, and disgusted. And it strikes me how, so often, choosing immediate gratification just ends up being horribly un-gratifying. Whereas, doing the thing that's harder pays off so much more.