Running loopholes

Today, I really thought that I was finally going to give myself a good reason to stay in bed and skip my runs on mornings when I feel like a lukewarm pile of crap.

Like this morning, for instance.

Except it's very hard for me to be like, OK - I feel like a lukewarm pile of crap due to this damned headache or whatever and, you know, I really would rather not run, so I won't. I'll just lie here in bed and wallow in my lukewarm misery. 

It is hard for me to shirk my morning runs because they are part of a finely established routine and routines are My Way and I'm very stuck in my ways.

I have my routines and I do not stray from these routines. Like, you know how they say that if you do something 17 times in a row you'll be more likely to continue doing it because the routine becomes normal in your mind or whatever? Yeah, well, with me, it's like DOUBLE NORMAL or, well, half as normal or something because once I'm in a routine it's barely possible for me to stray from it. Even if straying from the routine makes more sense than keeping to the routine or if straying from the routine could be a life-saving measure.

Which helps shine a little light on how I nearly killed myself with heat stroke instead of skipping a 9 mile run in 95 degree heat. A decision that would have been easy for 99.9% of the population to make correctly. Me though? Well, the routine was to run 9 miles on Saturday morning and, there it was, all being Saturday morning, so off I went, into the sweaty hot hellfire of a 95 degree morning, with the clear intention of killing myself with heat stroke but, and here's the important part, keeping to the routine.

So, there you have it - I take routines to the extreme. I'm regimented. I'm stuck in my ways. I'm psychotic. I'm unable to exercise the judgment of a dish towel. Etcetera.

But I have hope for myself and I'm working on a multi-step program to keep myself from dying an unnecessary but routine-fulfilling death by finding and exploiting justifications that make sense only to me.

For instance, one loophole I've been meaning to confirm and then use frequently is the one that goes, "If I feel like shit, but decide to go running anyway, I will have such an awful run (ie. It will be nowhere near the 24s and therefore a total failure) that it's not worth going anyway so I should just stay in bed and feel like crap."

Except that, this morning, as I set out to confirm this convenient truth, I must have done something magical with one side of my head pounding and one eyeball popping loose from its socket, because when I trotted back up my driveway after my run, I found that I'd done it FASTER than last time.

SHIT.

And I didn't have the lukewarm miserable headache anymore OR the popping eyeball!

DOUBLE SHIT.

That just won't do. How will I ever get to lie in bed without feeling guilty if I know that going for a run might actually make me feel better AND I might even improve my time?

Well, the answer here is, I won't. I won't ever be able to justify ditching out on a run for lukewarm misery in my comfy bed because the guilt would be too great. And even in all of my barely-Jewishness, the one thing to which I've managed to hold tight is my Jew Guilt. This power is very strong in me.

So, it looks like I'll have to come up with a more compelling reason to stay in bed on mornings of lukewarm crapiness when I don't have the 90 Degree Death Loophole to exploit.

Because you know I stick to THAT loophole with all of my might. In fact, I've even made it the 85 Degree Death Loophole on a few mornings when I found myself breaking a sweat putting on my sports bra. No one wants to run when you can't even get dressed without sweating through your underwear. That's just terrible.

Plus! You could die!

See, I'm very good at this loophole. I will have to work harder on the Lukewarm Misery one.