No training: The downside

There is a worm burrowing its way through my hamstrings.

Or so it seems. Yesterday I headed out to Nine Mile for an furlough afternoon of cross country skiing.

It went well. I didn't fall. And although my heart clattered in my chest like the engine of Model T, it held together. My beard iced up nicely, which is one of the reasons I've grown it. (Nothing makes a guy feel more like a Viking than an icy beard.)

But I did have to stop several times, usually about 30 yards from the crest of a hill, to catch my breath. (Sometimes it was so far ahead of me, that I couldn't even see it.) I had to double check the bottoms of my skis; did someone glue sandpaper to them?

Normally, I should be getting in better shape at this point in the season. It's been more than a week since I had last skied, and it showed. (It's worth noting that yesterday was the first day in which temps were significantly above zero in about decade. Or so it seems.)

The end result was that it felt, really, really good to get outside for a significant period of time. The sun was out, and it actually felt warm on my back.

But I'm hobbling around a bit this morning, and I'm thinking that although training is a thing of the past, maybe I should practice more.

It's time to retire

I've been training for nearly 30 years now. It's time to retire.

Oh, I'm still going to run. I'm still going to race. I'm going to ride my bicycle for long distances as fast as I can. I'll be doing laps in the pool. I'll glide through the woods on my cross country skis.

I'm just quitting the training. I'm going to set aside the obsession with numbers and goals. I'll abandon the single-minded devotion to progress and improvement.

For this year, the focus is going to be a fun. It's going to be on fitness. It's going to be on forgiveness and relaxation.

And beating Dave.

The marriage victory

In about a week and a half, Kris and I will have been married 18 years.

That's kind of a long time. If we had conceived a child before wedlock, he/she/it could be an adult now, and we would no longer be responsible when he/she/it was caught selling crack cocaine on Scott Street, racked up tens of thousands of dollars in text message fees or led police on a three-state high-speed pursuit.

So my -- excuse me, our -- marriage is a source of pride for me. (Not us. I'm not sure that it's a source of pride for Kris. And I'm not going to ask, either.) It's the one thing that I can point to in my life as a success.

Even so, I'm still learning how to properly weave my way through this "for-better-or-worse" partnership, and still stumble now and again. Sometimes it's not even my fault.

Kris woke up today to tell me that she's peeved at me. She dreamt that that I had a half of a day off, and that I went on some kind of trip without telling her.

"I was really mad," she said.

I carefully attempted to feel out the problem, in case there might be an actual time when I do have some free time (furlough!) and decided take a trip (the canoe/kayak store in Madison! Not that I have given this any thought) without telling her.

"But what if I would be home before you even knew it?" I asked.

"Well, that's what happened," she said. "It wasn't that you took the trip, it was that you didn't take me seriously. I was furious. I said, 'I want a divorce.'"

It's bad enough that I get blamed for things that I do do. But it's tough to take when I get in trouble for things that I don't do.

Of course, this situation in itself was minefield, and I walked through it carefully.

"Oh never mind," I could have said, "it was just a dream and you're overreacting."

BLAM! There goes my left foot.

Instead I said, "Wow, that's awful. I won't ever do anything like that."

She laughed.

And I'm back on safe ground, limbs intact.

One goal

When it comes to running and bicycling, my plan is not to have a plan.

But I do have one goal this year.

To beat Dave.

Actually, that's not quite right. The more specific goal is to Make Dave Hurt.

Actually, that's not quite right, but goals should be simple and straighforward, a mantra, if you will.

To be more specific, I would like to make two Daves hurt somehow this year.

The first Dave is Dave B., a dairy farmer from central Wisconsin. I ran cross country in high school with Dave, who is an easy-going, talkative, altogether likable person. He almost a year older than me, but 10 times the athlete and always was.

To him, pain is sweetness, and he pushes his body to the limit. He does things like mutter, "No hill, no hill" when riding up inclines and "No wind, no wind" when facing gale forces sweeping out of the west.

When Pete and I join him on rides, we basically get tucked in behind him and hang on for dear life. My main goal has been, when riding with Dave, is to not upchuck. All during this time, Dave chats as if he's sitting at a bar, drinking a beer, and not putting two of his fellow Hornets through a special kind of torture.

The other Dave is Dave P. He's young, lean and a natural runner. I got to know him years ago when we started to run together before our work at the Wausau Daily Herald. He was smoking, drinking, and doing everything a young man who is a journalist might be doing, and at first I was able to run with him. But soon he outpaced me in every way.

It would be nice to push him sometime, to make him breath hard, to hear his struggles as we charge up a hill. He lives on the East Coast now, but we get together at least once a year, often more, and we almost always run together.

I know these resolutions sound vague, and they are. But that's being done on purpose, because if I start to get specific, I start to fail to meet my goals early. And although I have not better than a 30 percent chance of success to Make Daves Hurt, I'd like to cling to the dream as long as possible.

Giving up on Mondays

Last night, I had the passing thought that I might get up early this morning and go for a short run.

I woke up in time, but it's 4 degrees out, it's dark and it's Monday. So instead of heading out in layers designed to keep me warm and dry, but instead will make me itch all over and smell like a stockyard, I decided to make a cup of coffee, answer e-mails and write this instead.

I don't regret the choice.

Going on furlough

Earlier this week I unexpectedly found myself free for a day.

This was certainly a mixed blessing. On one hand, it is a sign that the waves of this economic tsunami are crashing into the boat of my career, and it's starting to take on water. I might be forced to swim real soon.

On the other hand, when was the last time I had a completely free day? Perhaps it was the first day of summer after I finished fifth grade.

I had all kinds of plans. My main excuse for not writing and beginning a freelance career has been the lack of time. Now there was time. I could have gotten a start on a few projects that I have sitting in the back of my mind, could have begun sending out query letters, could have done some more research to find more markets for said potential freelance writing.

What did I do? Well,

* I went online and wasted an hour and half surfing the Web, looking at blogs and watching an episode of "The Big Bang Theory." (What can I say, I missed Monday's episode.)

* I popped in "Juno," a movie I had borrowed from the library. I think this was the best movie I have seen in a long, long, long time, and I think Jennifer Garner did a terrific job.

* I started to pace around the house. Normally, I would have taken the pooches and paced around the neighborhood, but it was 11 below zero. I wandered into the bathroom where I looked at my beard. I'm growing a beard. I picked up the beard trimmer that Kris bought for me at Fleet Farm, and wondered how I could get the various components to work on it. The directions did not mention how to change the components. I ended up getting a screwdriver out and taking off the clipper head, and as I did so, the spring-driven mechanism popped apart in four confusing pieces. I spent the next two hours putting the bastard back together again. While I was doing this, I contemplated death, because I found I was having trouble focusing my eyes on the teeny parts. I probably need reading glasses, the classic sign of aging. I fooled myself into thinking it was just a lighting problem.

* I worked myself into such a state, that I decided to damn the cold and went for a run anyway. It was a frigid slog, but it made me feel better.

* I ate lunch.

* I took a nap.

* I watched television.

* I wanted to go to work. I decided that I'm such a contrarian that the best way to motivate me is to order me not to do something.

The subzero equalizer

Just finished a 3-mile slog, but I feel like a conqueror.

It's 9 below zero out, -34 if you factor in wind chill, which of course I do.

There are times when I love the pure brutality of the deep Wisconsin winter.

These kinds of conditions are great equalizers. Nobody is fast when it's this cold. And just stepping out the door is a Norseman victory.

Mediocrity is freedom

I would get literally sick before each high school track race. Not to the point where I was actually throwing up, but I would be warming up for the mile, just lightly jogging around the track when I would get a bout of the dry heaves.

It wasn't the idea of losing so much; I had come to terms with that. It was that I would be losing in such a public manner, in front of everybody. It really bothered me that my failure was such a public spectacle.

Of course, that stress only made it worse. I was a classic choker on the track. Cross country wasn't so bad, because we'd run most of the race in the woods, away from everybody. My humiliation would be private.

Funny thing happened, though. In cross country I would run a 5-k race at my track mile pace. If I could lose in private, it didn't bother me. And then I didn't lose so much, either.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The fact that I cared how I performed caused me to get stressed out and tripped me up. When I didn't care so much, I relaxed and ran better. This only leads me to conclude that not caring leads to better performance.

This is why I am embracing mediocrity. It allows for the freedom of not caring. I've got to be careful here, though. Not caring could lead to better performance. Better performance leads to high expectations. High expectations leads to stress, and well, I'm back at the starting line once again, upchucking. (Good core workout, though. Builds strong abdominals. But that's not the goal here.)

That's why the key to mediocrity is to embrace it fully and not to think about any results whatsoever.

An inauspicious start

It all started in the field house of Wausau West High School, early spring 1982.

I was 16 years old, and set to run the quarter mile, my first race ever. It was an indoor meet, so instead of running one lap around the track, I think I had to make the circle four and half times.

With a paunch that I had carried since junior high school, I wasn't exactly the ideal specimen to compete for Colby High School. But deep down there was the hope that there was an undiscovered runner inside me with just the right mix of speed and endurance to make a star. Maybe when the gun went off, the inner animal would be unleashed and I would be transformed.

Despite these unspoken and almost unthought dreams, I was petrified. My heart was jumping like a hamster in my chest as we took our marks, and it seemed to scream when the gun went off. For what seemed like minutes, I stood there in my crouch, and my competitors took off like rabbits. By the time I did get moving, I lumbered along, with gasping lungs and scorching thighs. I held the eyes of my friends standing along the track, pleading wordlessly for help.

I was last that race. And every single race I ran for the rest of the season and the one after that. I moved up from the quarter to the mile and two mile, which did nothing but prolong the agony.

I'm 42 years old now, and I've toed hundreds of starting lines since that inauspicious start to my running career. I lost the excess weight, put it back on. Quit running and started again. Never been better than a middle of the packer, but there's always the hope that some day the real me, the one who blazes to the front of race and never relinquishes the lead, will emerge.

Of course, it takes work to become a great runner. Discipline. There needs to be speed work, long runs, plans and consistency. I have done none of this.

I've also tried to become a great bicyclist, cross-country skier, and for a few short weeks on a rink in White Bear Lake, Minn., a hockey player. None of it took.

My athletic career is a reflection of the rest of my life.

I've spent nearly 20 years trying to perfect my skills in a dying profession, newspaper journalism. I've had plenty of success, but I've also seen plenty of my coworkers move onward and upward, leaving me behind to choke on their dust. Most of the time they deserved it, a few times not.

Now I'm not complaining about any of this. I still have naive faith that we all get what we deserve in this life, one way or another. And I've spent way too much time on the couch to whine about the unfairness of it all.

But there have been times when I've gotten down on myself for my singular lack of ambition, talent and drive.

No more.

I've decided that it's time to relish the mediocrity.