Auspicious

–adjective
1. Promising success; propitious; opportune; favorable.
2. When all of the snow melts on your first day of marathon training.

A warm rain swept across my area a couple of days ago, cutting through the snow and ice. Where once we had a winter wonderland, we now have only a few white mounds. They slump into the roads, shrinking by the day.

This means that I’m no longer bound to the well-plowed 4-mile route near my house. The walls of snow that contained me are gone—I can once again explore Philadelphia’s suburbs to my heart’s content. Or rather my heart’s capabilities; I am limited only by my own aerobic fitness.

Normally I would call this fortunate. But there’s something that launches it well over the boundaries of fortunate and into the realm of auspicious. The day before the rains hit, I sat down and came up with a rough outline for my marathon training. I had been running before that, of course, but with no specific plan in mind. My first day of goal-oriented running, of genuine training, was the day the rains hit.

So I feel like this is a propitious and an opportune turn of events. I think these are favorable conditions. I feel that the next few months of training promise success.

Track’s Yellow Wood

I have officially resigned from the track team.

I will be student teaching this spring, which means that I have the work load of a full-time teacher (with no pay). Trying to do this and track at the same time would be possible, but one of the two pursuits would suffer. My impractical side wanted to try both, but reason eventually won out. I need to teach well more than I need to have another semester running with the team.

That last bit’s important; I will still be running, just not with the team. In fact, I’ll probably be running more than ever soon. No track means I don’t have to waste time training for the two-mile. I can finally get to the marathon training that’s always appealed to me.

That’s right. I’ll finally join most of my readers on the long (long, long) lonely road of marathon training. At least in a month or so. For now I’m just going to focus on getting back in shape and ramping my mileage back up.

Last week was very, very low intensity, as prescribed by my coach. He dropped me down to 43 miles- but not because of any injury. He wants all athletes to rest a bit before returning for preseason. Because, let’s face it, preseason is tough.

I’ve returned to school, and just this morning enjoyed my first run of the year with my team. We do two runs a day through most of preseason, with a shorter, easier run in the morning (to act as a sort of warm up). This morning’s run was supposed to be one such easy run.

Of course, the team is hardly known for keeping a controlled pace. We negatively split the 5 mile run, averaging a 6:19 mile. That’s fast for even our top guys. We may have been excited to be back together, or we may just have leftover energy from last week. Whatever the reason, though, I feel pretty damn warmed up for this afternoon’s workout.