Last night Patrick and I were invited to a fondue party in a château on an island in the St. Lawrence. Yes. Really. Did I mention I’m staying another ten days? Anyway we went and ate fondue with fifteen lovely French Canadians and drank numerous bottles of red wine, mostly tasty French wine but to my globalizatious surprise there was also a bottle of that yellow kangaroo stuff so ubiquitous at Eugene dinner parties.

After all that wine, our ride Antoine - along with the majority of the other guests - was too drunk to drive back to the city. Consequently I slept on a sad little sheetless cot in a room full of drunk snoring party guests. The sleeping was not good. And when I woke up and Patrick asked, do you have plans today? I realized, yes. Today I have to run eleven miles.

Back in the city I fuelled up on my now regular Quebec breakfast of Russian black tea, fresh croissants, and stinky cheese (did I mention I’m staying a while longer?) and headed out. I went to the Plains of Abraham as usual, planning to run a big figure eight around the art museum. I realized, though, that eleven miles would mean looping this loop at least four times. Or more. So I spotted a tiny steeple in the distance and decided to run for it. I ran down the Grande Allée, which is French for Grand Allée, until it turned into another street. When you have run so far in Quebec that the street has become a different street, they are helpful enough to hang two signs: one indicating the new street name, and a second one indicating the previous street name with a big red line through it. I ran far enough for this to happen several times.

The run was feeling strangely good. My posture and my breathing and my legs all felt strong, and I got to the church and back while enjoying the happy little exercise chemicals washing over my brain. Once again, however, I was unpleasantly surprised when I swung by a phone box to check the time… less than half done. It’s amazing how far you can get when you’re running.

And though the run didn’t end there, the story does. This is what always seems to happen lately on my Saturday runs. I feel good, I feel done, and then I’m just not, so I run a lot more without feeling particularly happy or engaged. I’m even considering getting an ipod or some related amusement thing. But this idea bugs me because I’m kind of a Luddite. More on this later. For now: bread stuffed with chocolate. Mmmmmmmmm.

Today it was gray and I was lazy, and then suddenly it was 4 in the afternoon and I hadn’t gone for my run yet. The idea of running the same icy circle I’ve been running all week – the one through a business district where the Quebecois, who apparently are not such big runners as Eugenians, stare openly with annoyance as I run by – was not any sort of motivation. So I agreed to join Patrick for a trip to the gym he recently joined.

The friendly trainer behind the desk at Energie Cardio let me in for free. She took my pulse (for insurance reasons, she mysteriously explained) and off I went to the treadmill. And then I ran, and ran, and ran on the treadmill for one hour. It wasn’t a fancy treadmill with superfluous but distracting numbers flashing, so I tried to amuse myself with a magazine. This did not work: too bumpy. Ultimately I watched Le Monde on the overhead television. There were subtitles instead of sound, and my French was decent enough to get me through stories about the recently freed hostages, avian flu, and the dangers of garden pesticides. Not particularly uplifting, but at least it passed the time and was good for my language practice.

It’s kind of neat, being able to run for an hour without feeling the need to stop. It’s certainly not something I could have done when this started less than two months ago. There were a few times I sped up or added a few degrees of incline just for variety. I don’t know how far or fast I went, but whatever.

And now, I will go eat well earned French food.

Saturday was my first ten miler, but I’m in a foréign city (the é is for proof) where I know only one person. He is not a runner. After confirming that I really, really couldn’t skip this run, even though it was a beautiful day for seeing Quebec and I was still working off some St. Patrick’s day damage, he pointed me to the Plaines d’Abraham. This is French for the Windy Icy Frostbite Death Hills of Abraham. Sadly my French is patchy at best, so I bounced off towards the park with wholly unfounded optimism about fresh air and exploring a new place and other assorted bullshit.

After about two minutes I realized the trails were 90% covered in very slick ice. I nearly wiped out at least three times just looking for a place to run. Finally I settled on the main drive through the park, which was only snowy at the margins. Since I had no way of telling how far my route would go, I just assumed ten minute miles and planned to run for and hour and forty minutes. After what felt like three quarters of that time I checked a phone box, only to find I’d been running for a mere forty minutes. So then I ran for an hour more.

It was cold, and I had to keep running by the same things because of all the ice, but overall it wasn’t actually horrible. I ran at my own pace, which is a bit slower than I run with the Saturday group, and although I was tired and a little uncomfortable at the end, I could have kept going. Not for another sixteen miles, but maybe for another two. Which, for the moment, I feel pretty good about. And now I don’t have to go that far again for a whole week. Wahoo.

Hills this Wednesday were less rainy, and less cold, and generally less horrible. They still felt bad, and by the fourth time running up I still wanted to hide behind some trees until my half hour was up, but this time sneaky Coach Phil waited just before the steepest ending hill and ran up with each of us as we arrived, saying how strong we looked. Which, in my case, was a complete lie. I know what it looks like to run up a hill looking strong, because my teammate Amy who is all posture and calf muscles bounces right up them with light quick steps as if her body is unaffected by gravity. I, on the other hand, hunch over and shove myself forward in effortful, wheezing, tiny increments as if running in an atmosphere composed largely of syrup.

Then I got in my truck and drove to Portland and got on an airplane and flew to Vermont and got in my friend Patrick’s car and drove to Quebec City, where I will spend the next week.

Where I will somehow, tomorrow, do a ten mile run in the snow on my own.

Where the keyboard is just different enough to be completely frustrating, so that is all for now.

After yanking out my wisdom tooth Friday afternoon, the mean oral surgeon’s nice assistant Laura told me not to do any strenuous activity for three days. Saturday’s nine miler seemed to fall into this category. I skipped it and slept in, which, while enjoyable, made my Saturday seem significantly less productive.

Today I biked ten minutes to a breakfast place, and when I got off my bike I felt flushed and nauseous. It’s not possible to get that out of shape that fast, is it?

My fucking wisdom tooth is impacted.

I’ve only ever had one wisdom tooth show itself, but I guess I wasn’t giving it enough attention because after three years of poking peacefully out it decided to violently emerge on Sunday. It is now stabbing into the back of my mouth creating various unpleasant abrasions and impeding many activities I enjoy, such as eating and swallowing. I have an appointment with an oral surgeon tomorrow but in the mean time I am hungry, dehydrated, and (in case this wasn’t apparent) really fucking cranky.

You can imagine, then, the gleeful gusto with which I approached my first hill training this afternoon. This windy, near-freezing, really fucking rainy afternoon. I was soaked to the bone in approximately thirty seconds, though the full hand/arm numbness didn’t set in for fifteen minutes, which at least distracted me from the knife-like pains in my jaw, or at least accompanied them harmoniously as I ran up a big muddy hill, over and over again, as Coach Phil intoned cheerfully, “This shouldn’t feel good!”

Well shit. I must be doing it right.

Yesterday’s training run was eight miles. It involved my first encounter with hills, which are pure evil, and my first encounter with Gu, which is evil in the form of gelatinous frosting power gel, and my first encounter with “chaffing,” which is worse than hills and Gu and will inevitably get even worse when I go eight miles three times in a row, and then two point six more miles just for garnish.

Oh, and then we were instructed to go home and sit in an icy cold bath for ten minutes.

So I would say the fun has officially begun.

Reason Number Four that I am running this marathon, which is a reason I won’t dwell on too long, is that I like to travel, and I like to write about my trips. At the moment, however, I am not traveling. I got back from nine months abroad in September and now I’m trying to finish my master’s thesis. After that I’ll be looking for a job. For the moment, I’m not going anywhere.

So basically I needed something to write about, and running a marathon seemed about as ridiculous as hanging out in Serbia.

When I go somewhere I like to read all about it (I can recommend lots of good books on Serbia…) and so it seemed natural to do the same thing for running. I wanted to see the full range of running book options, so I skipped my usual favorite independent & used bookstores for the local giant megabookstore with built-in giant megacoffeeshop.

There were endless shelves of running books, as I had hoped. They fell largely into five categories:

(1) Training books, with weekly schedules on how far to run. I don’t need these, because I have a coach and I’m stickin with him.

(2) Weight loss books, with advice on how to run and diet in order to slim down. I’m guessing this will happen anyway, whether or not I read a book about it. What with the insane amount of running I am now doing.

(3) Inspirational books, with various combinations of quotes and stories for motivation and encouragement. Gag, gag.

(4) Better running books, with information on how to run faster / farther / more. Pretty much any running I do at this point is faster farther more than I used to. Don’t need no book for that either.

(5) Women’s running books, which were a lot like the other running books but more irritating. And with sections on pregnancy and menopause. Nope.

In the spirit of giving this a real go I left with the Runner’s World Complete Book of Beginning Running – mostly because it had a nice glossy section on nutrition, and Why We Run by Bernd Heinrich. The latter has turned out to be a neato natural history book about the physiology of endurance in the animal kingdom.

Online I ordered cheap used copies of How Running Changed My Life and First Marathons, both collections of predictably soggy sentimental essays with titles like “What Is She Running From?” and “Zen and the Art of Marathon Running.” I bought these mostly to ridicule. So far so good.

Well, my run today felt like ass. And not like svelte runner’s ass. Just ass.

I don’t know why this is. I wasn’t going any faster or any farther than usual. But my lungs got that feeling that they used to get back when I would smoke the occasional cigarette at a bar: the morning after they would be too small for my bike trip to school. That is how my run felt. And no cigarettes were involved.

Also today I got my March training schedule, and we’re up to five days a week instead of four. Four seemed manageable. Five might be ok except that one of them is hills, and another is supposed to be a bit speedier. Ass + hills + speedier = bleak running day.

Perhaps this is a good time – for my own good – to bring up the next reason on the list of Reasons Why I Am Doing This. Reason Number Three: One day, it seems, I may get old. And there is a very particular way I want this to happen.

I’m not getting too old just yet. No gray hair, minimal strange aches, and Eugene’s moist climate has even thwarted the crinkly lines that I’m bound to get one of these days from the skeptical squinting and way-too-loud laughing that are my two dominant expressions. But last year I lived for a few months in Amsterdam, and Dutch old people rock. They bike about in eighty-year-old pairs, slender and fit and seemingly free of hip replacements.

Now I don’t want to be running when I’m eighty. I don’t even want to be running when I’m forty. I like my knees, for example. And already I am getting these weird big thighs when I’d rather have calves. But I want to be doing something, from the point that this all ends until my body just won’t do it anymore: hiking up things, biking over things. I want to be on teams – lacrosse, kickball, soccer, whatever. Community teams that play in parks on Saturday afternoons and then go drink beer. And since I’m not particularly gifted at any one sport, at least I can be in shape enough to not suck. And this seems like a good kick-start to that.

Now I know that some of you, the runners among you, are still thinking, it’s only a matter of time. Soon she’s going to want to keep running. I realize that may be the case, though I think you’re wrong. When I got a tattoo in college the tattoo artist said, Oh, you’ll be back again. But you know what? That was ten years ago, and I still only have one tattoo.

But I kind of want another one.

A bigger one.

I kind of want it a lot.