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.