I got very little sleep last night so I called Larry at 5:15am and said I was skipping the morning run and going back to bed. He seemed quite un-disappointed. I feel a little bad because I'm pretty sure he followed my example. I went down for the noon run a little early and got in 1.7 miles on the treadmill before Tom was ready to go. I think Nathan is out of town this week. Tom had done a tough 10 mile canyon run this morning (man, he's training well!) so he was only going 4 easy miles. Even though it was 82' or so, and the humidity was up, I still enjoyed the run and talk with Tom (as usual). I then added another 2.6 miles on my own. I think I averaged around 8:30/mi overall for the 8.3 miles. The ankle I twisted about 10 days ago is doing well, but it's complaining a bit that I put 52 miles on it last week, including 16 miles on Saturday. Many of you know that shortly after Latter-day Saint missionaries return home after serving full-time for two years they are normally asked to speak in church. Often many of their friends and family attend to hear them speak. Yesterday a couple in our ward, the Gessels, spoke in church after returning from Portland, Oregon where President Gessel had served as mission president for 3 years. Many of the hundreds of missionaries who had served in their mission while they were there were in attendance. The chapel was nearly full before the regular ward members started arriving. What an amazing meeting. The stake president was in attendance and authorized the meeting to be extended by 15 minutes. I drank in every moment. The messages were inspiring and the spirit was wonderful. I bring up this meeting because President Gessel presented a wonderful analogy that I could relate to, both in my life in general, and in my running. He said the previous mission president told him being a mission president was like running on a treadmill. Once you get on it may slow down or speed up, but it never stops for three years. President Gessel said that for him it was more like a 3 year long game of Whack-A-Mole. What an accurate description of how so many of my days seem to go. I wake up in the morning, whack on as many moles that pop up as I can (never getting all of them), review my score at the end of the day, occasionally consider how to adjust my strategy to successfully whack more moles in the future, then sleep, wake, repeat. Sometimes it's fun whacking the moles and I do pretty well. Sometimes my arm aches, the mallet seems so heavy, and I can't seem to hit even a single mole. What a great analogy! If that was the only thing I got from the meeting it would have been worth attending, but that was just one sparkle of a many-faceted gem. It was brilliant!
If you are not familiar with Whack-A-Mole...from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whack-a-mole:
"Whac-A-Mole is a popular arcade rededemption game. A typical Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole
and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game
starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The
object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their
holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby
adding to the player's score."
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