Thursday Late Night Running

Yes, the time on the post is right -- 4-something Central time Friday morning. I hadn't done crap the rest of this week. In fact, Waverly probably ran more miles than me as she runs Monday thru Thursday at school. (And she has her second junior high cross country meet this Saturday morning in Brenham at 8:30 a.m.)

I ran about a mile and a quarter at approximately 8:30 p.m. Pacific time to the IHOP for a late dinner. I ate, left the restaraunt at close to 9:30 p.m., walked back and waited until about 11:15 p.m. to head downstairs here at the Marriott Courtyard in Pasadena to run on the treadmill.

I knew I couldn't go fast (for me) on the treadmill so the idea was to try and go an hour upping the mph .1 every 10 minutes and if things were going good, shoot for two hours.

Well, my stomach wouldn't let me make it past 31 minutes. That's when I started to get light-headed. So back upstairs here to the sixth floor.

I went back downstairs at about, yes, you're reading this right, 1:30 a.m., I picked up at the mph marking that I left off (well, .1 mph more) and went back at it while reading the latest edition of Sports Illustrated. Things were going good as I felt my stomach acting up again, but it was reading the emotional story of Mike Coolbaugh, the Tulsa Drillers minor league baseball coach that was recently killed as the result of a batted ball while he was coaching first base.

Right at about 27 minutes into the run, it talked about the player, Tino Sanchez, who hit the ball that killed his coach and how he met with the late coach's sister and her sister-in-law for the first time. My emotions got the better of me ... especially down in the bottom right-hand corner of page 61 when this was written about Coolbaugh (who couldn't seem to get a brake during his playing days):

"Yet off the field Coolbaugh was an object of envy. He took his two boys with him everywhere, couldn't seem to breather without holding them."

I could only think about Waverly.

Many don't have quite the idea of some of the despair that I've faced recently. Some, of course, has been recent crap (and how foolish it has been) and other has been a bit prolonged (and that's quite foolish too ... but that is something that I've been trying to make changes in and those ideas aren't being acted upon.)

It's been tough on me. I'm not proud to admit that I've thought of the worst. Does that make me a bad person? No. It just means that I hurt like others do.

So I stopped this time at 30 minutes, just a bit overwhelmed with emotion.

I love my daughter. I really do. I feel like I'm the most lucky father in the world.

I talked to her this evening after she made it home from her volleyball game. She told me some things that she did well and a couple of mistakes that she said that she made, including one that her coaches got on her about pretty hard. But she said she knew what she didn't do and why they were upset. (And I didn't ask. She just told me.)

The first scrimmage two weeks ago wasn't quite the same.

Her coaches, who are both extremely professional but aren't going to try to be coaches in the American Pro Volleyball Association anytime soon, really chewed their butts out and shortly into the Rendezvous, her emotions took over. It's my job not to sugar coat things for her.

But in a loving way, I told her, "Welcome to public school athletics."

However, she said after the analysis this evening, "I had fun."

The volleyball and the cross country hasn't been mixing well for her. It is kind of tough to do two things and not have to give up one or the other occasionally. This weekend, for example, her volleyball team has a tournament on Friday and Saturday and she has a cross country meet on Saturday. (We're still going to cart her from Brenham to Conroe after the meet so she can go support her team on Saturday at noon. It is a lesson that we pointed out to her two years ago when she sat out of an Upward basketball game at our church the day before she ran the Aramco Houston Half Marathon. And thank goodness, it has stuck.)

She was going to miss the first game on Saturday for the cross country meet; however, she's not playing volleyball at all this weekend. Why? Her coach indicated that a lot of the girls on the "A" team are not going to be available Saturday, October 20 and that she will move her up and let her play with them.

But guess what? She has the last of five cross country meets that day! She play volleyball. :)

This coming week she was going to have another conflict, but her cross country coach really stepped up to allow Waverly to do both. They had a meet on Thursday, the 4th, and a volleyball match. Actually, it is the district meet! Waverly is only one of two girls now on the 7th grade cross country team so it isn't like they can score and win the district with just two of them.

So Waverly could play volleyball, I asked her to ask her coach if she could run Nike South on Friday afternoon, October 5 at Bear Branch Sports Park in The Woodlands.

Her coach checked with the school's principal to see if it would be OK and she is going to volunteer her time to go with Waverly (since they have to have a school official to be able to wear her school colors and participate in the Junior High race.)

I guess if she wasn't a good kid, they wouldn't go out of the way for her like that.

So, she'll run the Junior High girls race and then I'll run the Open race at 6:30 p.m., which will benefit The Woodlands Running Club, before I hop on a plane that evening to Newark, New Jersey to run a couple of events in New York and Connecticut.