OK, I'm Done.

I'm all done trying to take the higher ground - this just flat out SUCKS.

Let's recap, hmmm? Three weeks before this marathon and I get some kind of tuberculosis or malaria or whatever the hell that was. Translation: training sacked for the entire week. For a person like me, this is bad because training is my sanity. A few days without it and I get moody and anxious and we'll just say very far away from my happy place. Add in someone's sick practical joke of letting EVERY runner on the planet out for their jaunts just as I'm going to or coming from work all week, and you have the recipe for my crappy mood.

But, OK, moving on - just as I'm getting over that plague I manage to do a face plant into a @*&#%$! bush and cement planter, which really jacks up my shin and knee and causes me to miss my last 23-mile training run (which would have ROCKED because the weather was perfect for it!). But fine, OK, find a way to make peace with it all and move on, I didn't need the run anyway blah blah let's just quit freaking out, it's just a race... yeah, shut up. Missing that run sucked and somewhere inside of myself I was counting on it to convince me that I could actually do this. Anyway, more training gone.

Knee gets better and damn if I don't fall off my bike! WTF!??

You know what, at this point I say fine. Whatever. I have resolved to taper. Heal and rest, relax - bring it all. I'm done with this physical war. It's all good for a few days and I think that this might just be working, I gain a little more confidence even without the 23-miler and then the mental bombs drop.

Par for the week, sorting out my grandma's estate broadsided me. This was a woman I thought would never die just because she'd decided not to. She made her own way in the world and paid her own bills. Opened her own business and told anyone who didn't like it to go to hell. She was no delicate flower even when being so was fashionable, she cussed like a sailor and told me not to bite my nails. She was classy and elegant and had finer taste than anyone I've ever met, yet she cleaned her own gutters and fixed her own furnace. There never was someone so alive. She survived war, crime, chauvinism, and she always made her own way, especially if someone told her it was impossible.

She died in her sleep and going into her room, things jumped out and wrapped themselves around my throat. A half finished crossword puzzle. A hairbrush with strands of hair. A bookmarked chapter of some old crime novel. Your mother is a wreck, you're supposed to be here for her so you can't come apart kid, just swallow hard and sort the linens and old pictures...try not to look at them for too long."

And two days later I went to a funeral for a woman I talked with not two weeks prior. I should have talked with her longer, asked her how she was feeling, something. And not only that but the air in there was saturated with feelings just like that and they spilled onto me and soaked in and no matter how I'd wring myself I couldn't get them out.

26.2 miles is too far to try to carry all of this. I have three days and some of it just needs to stay here. I'm tired and I'm afraid and I don't want to swallow hard anymore. Eight miles the other day wasn't enough to make me feel like this would be OK. This isn't fair and I don't understand why it's all coming NOW, or why whatever gods may be are not satisfied that I have learned to pick myself up and dust myself off by now - puta que pariu!!!

OK, so I'm done, I have to be. I'm leaving it all here and if it's waiting for me when I get back on Saturday, so be it.

But I'm not taking it with me.