thirty days

Thirty days is a long time.  It's time enough to form a new habit, serve jail time with Lindsay Lohan, or grow your hair out half an inch.  In thirty days the earth will spin around thirty times, and you can sample a month of Amazon.com Prime membership (with free 2 day shipping!) at no charge.  Thirty days can turn a losing team into a winning one, a dying plant into a thriving one.

Despite all the things that can happen in a month's time, we're all aware of just how quickly the calendar's page begs to be flipped once again.  A month is nothing!  Which explains my excitement but also my anxiety when I realized yesterday that October 23rd was only thirty days away.  For those of you who have dared not to fervently follow my agenda, this date has been in my brain for most of 2010.  On October 23rd, at 7 AM, someone will fire a gun into the air and I will proceed to run for 26.2 miles.  I haven't lost my mind, but I have decided to run my first-ever marathon (which some would say are equivalent statements.)

I've been running for exercise off and on over the last 2 years, but at this point I've been specifically training for the marathon for 14 weeks.  It's been fourteen weeks of early mornings, side stitches, tight hamstrings, aching knees, blisters and hideous toenails.  But it's also been fourteen weeks of beautiful sunrises, refreshing rains, riverside trails, new friends, and surprisingly honest conversations.  It's been three months of growing stronger, running faster, trusting that the long mileage scheduled for me each Saturday morning will not only be doable, but even enjoyable!  And so my feet, which two years ago could run no further than two miles, can now carry me for at least twenty.  And in thirty days, they will carry me across a finish line that has become so much more than a mark on the road.  The summer passed before I could even wish it well, and the next month will only fly even faster.  But as I look back, I can't help but smile for how much that's happened, for how much ground I have covered.  And I know that in thirty days, when those fearsome 26.2 miles are behind me, I will have the strength to keep going, to keep growing, to keep running ahead.