My friend Dave, who is a real runner – not a just-this-once runner like me – and who keeps a blog – the kind of blog that you check each day thinking I hope there’s a new post – has made reference to the fact that one key feature of his running success is that he is a stoic. To quote a recent entry of his, “I could hold my breath longer than anyone underwater, not because I had better lungs, just because I cared less about how uncomfortable it became.” And I just want to be clear, right up front, before this becomes painfully apparent and you feel surprised and misled: I am no stoic. By no definition of the word, and at no point in my life.

To be fair, I am no drama queen or martyr either. And, in certain circumstances, I do some things that can be confused with stoicism. While traveling, for example, I can eat cheese sandwiches and sleep in bus stations for weeks on end. I can amuse myself in lonely, empty places pretty much indefinitely. But upon closer inspection what I really have is a very low threshold for happiness. I can do things that seem awful because I don’t really find them awful.

The key difference here is that when I actually find something awful, rare as that is, I can’t deal with it at all. I am particularly a wuss when it comes to sickness and injury. I really, really don’t like feeling bad. I don’t buck up. I don’t make the best of it. I wallow in misery.

I bring this up now because I just went for a solo run in the cold rain, and to my surprise it felt pretty good. But as I was running, thinking something along the lines of how surprising that this solo run in the cold rain feels pretty good, I had a sudden and unwelcome realization: this level of comfort is simply not sustainable. At some point in this training, as I have learned from various running blogs and books, my legs are going to feel like jelly and my mental health will deteriorate and – Good God! – my toenails are going to fall off. And nothing, nothing about this appeals to me. This is not the kind of adventure I’m seeking.

So I’m just letting you all know. That way, when the tone of this blog goes from self-mocking skeptical how-about-that to weary, angry, what-the-fuck, at least you will be ready for it. Because I like my toenails, and I’m not letting go of them without a whole lot of belligerence.