Mediocre is okay, unless you're Daniel Lincoln

Week two is in the books and I'm still feeling good. Well, I'm feeling like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag, but that's probably as good as can be expected having not run this consistently in years. I ended up hitting almost 25 miles this week, which confirms my suspicions that Runner's World is full of crap when they write articles about PRing in the marathon off 30 miles per week. To get good at something, you have to do that thing a lot. Running is no different, and 30 miles per week is not a lot. Luckily, I don't really want to get good at running, I just want to be better at life.

You know how people say that the key to a good life is doing everything in moderation? My motto used to be "nothing in moderation". I dedicated myself to running at the expense of almost everything else. It works out well if you're in a position where you can make some major sacrifices for something that you're passionate about, but it's not very sustainable -- at least not for me. One of the hardest things about coming back to running was knowing that it'd be impossible for me to compete with my college self. I couldn't stand the thought of losing some 10k fun run to a scrub who I could have wiped the floor with a year or two earlier. I know that sounds arrogant for someone who didn't even finish in the top 100 at Nationals, but I could clean up at local fun runs, just check out my back to back Jingle Bell Run trophies. Actually don't fact check that, I may have only won it once. The fact that I don't even remember speaks volumes to how much a logical person should care about fun run wins.

Regardless, a key to getting myself out the door again was accepting that being mediocre is okay. There are far more important things to me now than running an arbitrary distance as fast as I can. I know, plenty of people work real jobs and still run incredibly well. Wasn't Daniel Lincoln in med school when he won the Steeplechase at the US Outdoor Championships? Well those people are assholes for making the rest of us look bad. For now, I'll just be a little less of a candy-ass, next year I'll challenge Daniel Lincoln to race.

This week's mileage:
Sunday: 5.4
Monday: 3.16
Tuesday: 0
Wednesday: 3.61
Thursday: 4.55
Friday: 2.65
Saturday: 5
Total: 24.37

And of course, I can't sign off without mentioning the Broncos-Patriots game. It was disappointing, yes. But as I posted on Facebook right after the game, this was still the most enjoyable season as a Broncos fan since 1998. Maybe Tebow never becomes a consistent premier passer like Brady or Manning. But maybe he does. Sprinkled throughout a season of ugly throws and disappointing blowouts were brief moments of brilliance. There's definitely potential, and that's more than we've had since '06.