Joke's on me!

Tuesday and Thursday mornings my running buddy Mark drives 20 minutes from his house to mine to run 10 miles at 5:10 in the morning. Lucky for me, I just have to get up and be ready by 5:10 a.m. We spend the 1.5 hours talking about everything and anything under the sun, joking and laughing and generally having too much fun for running 10 miles. In fact, I firmly believe that 10 miles with a buddy is equivalent to 5 miles alone -- I'll take good company any day of the week!

He harasses me at least once a run about the fact that I get to roll out of bed while he is hiking halfway across the city. In all fairness, I get (at least) one Ironman mention every run, so I don't mind taking the harassment :)

Most mornings I am ready to roll by 5:05 a.m. and I sit on the couch with my Blackberry waiting for his text message to tell me he has arrived. I usually close my eyes for a moment and enjoy the last moments of quiet before starting the day. Tuesday morning during this quiet time my mind started to play games on me ... and I started thinking, "Hmmm, maybe Mark will be a few minutes late so I can get a couple more minutes of sleep" -- and then it went to -- "Maybe Mark will have overslept" -- "No, he would have texted me by now" -- "Hmmm, what am I going to do if Mark did oversleep?" -- "Maybe I will sleep for 30 minutes and then go run for an hour" -- my thoughts were finally interrupted by my Blackberry. Message received "I'm here". Time to roll.

I told Mark about my mental volley Tuesday morning and he focused not so much on how tired I was but on harassing me (as usual, all in good fun) for complaining since he had gotten up a whopping 45 minutes before me.

So, this morning I woke up at 4:50 a.m., brushed my teeth, put on my contacts, put on my running clothes and shoes, turned on my Garmin and sat -- ok laid -- on the couch to wait for Mark. I figured I had about 5 minutes until he arrived and par for the course, my mind started racing with the same thoughts that I had on Tuesday. Just like Tuesday, my thoughts were interrupted by my Blackberry, except this time Mark's text message read: "Sorry, I overslept". Crap!

I immediately replied, "No problem, how about Friday?" While I was incredibly disappointed, Mark is very reliable and in the entire time we have been training together we have each only overslept once (see my post: The Equivalent of the Party Foul), so I couldn't be mad and besides, he DOES make the sacrifice twice a week before dawn to drive to my house and then fight traffic to get back home.

While I waited for his reply about Friday (mostly because his reply was going to impact how far I decided to run on my own), I looked at the text message again, and I had received a second message that I had missed ... "Just kidding, I'm here".

Joke's on me!

We had a great run - wonderful t-shirt and shorts weather, lots of laughs and some speed work mixed in for good measure. I am going to miss our runs next week while I am traveling (which means my runs alone will feel that much longer!).