Quick caveat, I am a Peter Sellers fan and I still think that the original 'Pink Panther' is one of the best movies ever, all things considered...Peter Sellers is hilarious, David Niven is the definition of cool, Claudia Cardinale and Simone....well....va va va voom; and the score by Henry Mancini is my all time favorite soundtrack. So successful that the piano intro has become entwined with the Pink Panther himself, which is also 'wrong'. The actual Pink Panther was a diamond (in the movie)...so there! Anyway, Sellers was in The Mouse that Roared (my original point) about the tiny country of Grand Fenwick which declares war on the U.S. The mouse I'm referring to is MBH who said I could use her name, I'm just more comfortable not - she went through C210K last August all the way through the Vulcan 10K.. Cute, cute cute!!!! Very smart and personable and a little quiet (thus 'the mouse'), and I mean that in a flattering way. She made a bunch of the group runs, ran the 5K, the Vulcan Run and decided to push on to run the Mercedes Half. Somewhere right around the time of the Mercedes, I think right after she sent me an e-mail telling me how much fun she had and what an achievement it was for her. Then she added, "not sure if you know my story".....and I did not. MBH was a swimmer, healthy and used to hard work as most swimmers are, then she 'contracted' Cystic Fibrosis. Google it, it is a debilitating disease that allows a sticky mucus build up in the lungs (in her case). It is not uncommon in children and young adults and can result in early death. MBH said in her e-mail that here she was mid 20's, in graduate school,living at home with her parents and lugging around an oxygen tank. Not a great recipe for a social life. Fast forward a couple of years - MBH had a successful DOUBLE LUNG TRANSPLANT and completed the Mercedes Half. I still recall the end of her e-mail; "I don't know that I love running, but I love that I can run; maybe I'm channeling my donor." Out of tragedy (the donors death) came triumph, MBH's life! Sometime when you're really whiny - or to paraphrase George Gipp, "when you're really up against it", and the run (or runs) just isn't (aren't) going your way remember that in so many ways your struggle could be worse. Kit Armstrong pointed out that too often we say "I HAVE to go run", when we should say "I GET to go run." As a parallel - "I have to go get my kids" vs "I get to go get my kids." What if you didn't have them.....we GET to do a lot of stuff that we say we HAVE to do. Running is my stress relief, my 'diet' (if the furnace is hot enough, it'll burn anything), my therapy, my brain dump. my church, my prayer time, my ooohhmmmmm time, my happy time. And more times than not it has turned my angry/mad/pissed off time into my...okay, I understand and can rationally deal with that #*&%$ moron. With apologies to Dickens it is my best of times and never my worst of times, not reflectively. I've had some pretty awful runs....but like MBH I'm still excited that I CAN run. Had a hot 3 miles today, kind of a recovery run from Saturday's 5K and yesterdays 8 miler - Saturday was great as always, and yesterday was just a 'cover the distance' kind of run. As Rumpole of the Bailey said, 'She who must be obeyed' was angry with me - (hell, who knows why...she was probably mad when she woke up and saw that she was STILL married to the idiot), so I ran alone and pretty much for my life. This morning I'm running with RD who's progress has been terrific, we were doing 3 miles, at her pace, on the sidewalk. Now, when I'm running a much slower pace or tired or both, I sometimes don't pick my feet up like I normally do or like I should! All of a sudden I'm reeling like a drunken sailor and somewhere Chris Berman is yelling, "there does Danny Haralson rumbling, bumbling, stumbling down the sidewalk". "Whop!" The good thing is when you rumble/bumble/stumble you can sorta pick out your landing spot and I did...a nice soft grassy spot. It's so hard to be cool when you trip - whether you fall or just stumble, there's no way to recover gracefully. You just hope no one saw and change the subject, "Yeah I'm fine (sweaty and covered in grass clippings like a green Sasquatch); how bout them Braves"? Thankfully it was only about 6 feet from the end of the run so I didn't have to run through Trussville with the police trying to capture a green Bigfoot, or scaring small children (I do that already). So I wiped off, trying hard to be nonchalant and failing miserably and in the words of Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that."