My mileage since the half-marathon on April 19 has been a classic model of recovery - slow, careful progression, with a mixture of hills, speed-work, and long runs. And today I shifted into another gear - a 30-mile week. I know this sounds obsessive-compulsive, but after all I do record my mileage from my GPS watch and I enter it in my log every day, so it was an easy matter of displaying this good data on an Excel bar chart. My daughter would be proud!
I could almost feel the sound of the clutch being gently pressed, the RPMs dropping down - Third Gear! Suddenly it feels as if I am on track for a half-marathon, or perhaps even a marathon.
It was a good morning - a cool breeze blowing continuously, and a visiting runner from St. Louis running with us, a veteran of eight marathons. It made me start thinking again of the "work of noble note" that Tennyson talked about in his poem Ulysses that I have decided to commit to memory. What better verses to recite during the final miles of a distance race?
"There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die."
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