The Hustle Diaries: Laurels

I didn't do anything else yesterday. I had a single productive hour, and that was it. Well, I did laundry and made a Crazy Addict video, but I didn't do anything else towards the end of earning money.

This morning I went to the gym for an hour and a half to do the treadmill, the bike, and weights, and I listened to one of my running podcasts. They almost always interview elite runners and it gets me wishing I had more dedication, so I could actually do speedwork instead of avoiding it because it's not fun. Then I could get fast and actually start placing in my age group and before I knew it my marathon time would be literally cut in half and I'd be an elite runner too. And then I'd have sponsors so I wouldn't have to run in the same pair of shoes for two years, I'd be able to replace them every 400-500 miles like you're supposed to. It would be really, really weird for my feet, always running in new-feeling shoes. But on the downside, even though all my races would be paid for, I would only be able to enter a maximum of four per year because I'd have to do so much recovery, I'd be running so fast.

My real love is running far, not fast, but it's harder to find sponsors when you're not "winning" anything, you're just going out one day and running 100 miles in one shot because you're nuts. And in this running daydream I need sponsors. It's silly how much I love the idea of running marathons and ultras. Lots of them. Back to back to back to back.

I think, actually, that I need to stop talking about it and start doing it. Every running coach in the world advises never to run the marathon distance in the course of your training, because strain overexertion injury blah blah blah. But your body can totally handle the marathon distance at an actual race, so what's the difference, really, between 26.2 miles that you paid to run and 26.2 miles that you didn't? Besides, a fair number of people (about a thousand, most in the United States) have had race seasons of running a marathon (or two!) every single weekend; that's how there exist people who have run over 500 marathons - even over 1,000 - in their lifetimes. So I am going to start a tradition this Sunday: the tradition of running 26.2 miles once a week for the rest of my life. That'll be pretty darn awesome. Excuse me, I've got some routes to plan.

(Sorry, this was supposed to be about hustling. I haven't done any more hustling. I have nothing to report.)