Long Train Running: A Chicago Marathon Story | Chapter 9 — The Unfinished Line
By the time this is published, the Chicago Endurance Sports (CES) training group I’d been running with this summer will be gathering at the Ben Franklin statue in Lincoln Park getting ready to have their last long-ish training run before Race Day. I will be asleep. Or maybe I’ll have dragged my fickle body out of bed to bang out some work before the kid wakes up and the dog needs to be taken out and the wife needs her coffee. The point is that I won’t be at the Ben Franklin statue in Lincoln Park getting ready to have a run. Because I’m not running the Chicago Marathon.
Long Train Running: A Chicago Marathon Story | Chapter 7 — Easy Does It
Marathon training puts time and distance into relative perspective. Once you prove you can run seventeen miles on a Saturday morning, jogging a quick five constitutes an easy run. Six miles is nothing. It’s a breeze. It feels like less work than walking across the street to pick up my dry cleaning. Christ, I hate running errands.
Anxiety is the thing that’s ripped our country apart. It has divided us, caused us to fear and hate those who think and live differently than us, and even caused us to hate those who only slightly disagree with us. It has led to panic and overreaction. And I worry that American Anxiety is only going to exacerbate the social and political divide in this country to the point that there is no coming back.