So the marathon is five weeks from yesterday. And yesterday my teammates ran about twenty miles, and I did not. I sat in the sun selling miscellaneous goods, and then I biked and climbed in place for forty-five minutes.

This was making me a bit worried, this gross deviation from the standard marathon training program. You know, the one that involves a lot of running. But Dave consulted his friend Viet and they put together a new training program for me – one that will get my body ready without wrecking my knee. I carry The Schedule with me at all times. The Schedule begins with Dave’s cheery explanation, “You’re pretty much going to be working more and harder, but you’re going to be running less.”

The Schedule has a workout for me for every single day until the marathon. Actually each day has three to four workouts. Two of these per day are endless sets of leg lifts, which it turns out I have been doing wrong up to this point and which are, in fact, far more uncomfortable and exhausting than my wrong ones. The third workout, and fourth on some days, is running and/or biking and/or the elliptical. Each workout is followed by extended specific stretching, which I like, and then by icing, which by Dave’s decree is the only thing I am allowed to do while reading.

So there it is. Five more weeks. I am trying not to cheat and I am trying not to hate the elliptical machine and I am trying to be thankful that at least I am a graduate student, so I won’t get fired for spending nearly three hours a day obsessing over my leg muscles. And today I ran for half an hour, past the purple blooming Empress trees and the foul-smelling photinia and the baseball-sized Saturn of Eugene’s model solar system, and it all felt pretty good.