Look, I'm still alive!  I know it's been a while.  I think the last time I wrote anything was in September when I ran until my legs vowed vengeance upon me and my whole family.  How are you wonderful people doing these days?

What's new in my life?  Well, I am once again studying for my promotion test.  As always I'm expecting to make it.  I'm also taking college classes these days.  Slowly working my way towards a degree in Criminal Justice.  I can't say I'm a fan of the online classes.  I much prefer classroom style, where I can ask questions and feel like the professor can actually teach me something.  Watching an online video and writing a paper on it just doesn't make me feel like I'm learning anything.  Still, it's getting me towards my degree, and maybe once I get back to the states I'll be able to take some 'standard' classes and feel better about it.

As far as work goes, things are the same as they always are.  I'm still working on radar systems for NATO.  Tomorrow is likely to be a stressful day.  The network I do all my work on has been down all last week, so tomorrow my boss is going to ask me what progress I've made, and I'll have to tell him none.  He'll get upset and say it's 'cos I'm a half-assed bum (he once accused me of not even coming in to work).  Still, I know I was going through training stuff, and I have evidence that I notified the network guys things weren't working, they're the ones that haven't done anything about it.  So, I just have to try to keep calm and remember that in one more year I'll be on my way out of here and to another base.

As I awoke this morning I had a thought sitting in the back of my mind, and while my eyes were adjusting to the light of the waking world this thought pushed its way to the front.

"This is the last day of leave before you have to head back in to work. What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, I already slept in, so that's checked off the list. How about watch a movie and surf the internet?"

"Not good enough, when was the last time you went out and pushed yourself on a good distance run?"

"I guess it's been a few weeks, I've mostly just been hiking while on leave."

"Then today's the day, it's not like you have anything else to do."

So, I checked my email and threw on some running clothes (I've learned that the people around here prefer I wear clothing while running, so I try to be polite). Then I snagged my fancy-pants GPS watch from its charger and headed for the door.

Now, at this point I hadn't really given much thought as to how far I should run. I've got an eight mile course that I occasionally do, but I was feeling like stepping it up a notch. A couple of miles into it I came to the conclusion that I would go for ten miles today and see how I felt, perhaps do a little more if I was doing well enough. The first few miles went great, but around mile four or five my pace started slowing down a little more than I preferred. That's alright, though, just means it will take a little longer. I reached the end of the first eight miles at around 1:28, and came to the conclusion that I could definitely do those last couple of miles, so I made a turn away from my house and kept on going.

Everything was fine. Everything was dandy. Then I noticed that this was a trap. I had gone too far, I could see the turn around point down the road just as my watch signalled me of the ten mile point. I was now about two miles from home. I could either stop now and walk home, or I could keep going. I had tricked me into this, so I kept running. I hit the turn around point and started heading back.

My pace had slowed down quite a bit by this time, but I kept on going. After all, I couldn't give up, there was a plan hidden in all of this. I learned what that plan was as I approached my house. It was just under twelve and a half miles so far, all I had to do was head down that stretch of road over there and come back to make it an actual half-marathon. Was this my secret goal the whole time? It was indeed.

In the end I managed a time of 2:35:14. It's a personal record, my only other half-marathon being in the 2:45 area. I congratulated myself for shaving ten minutes off my time and sat down. This may or may not have been a huge mistake. Instantly muscles everywhere were screaming at me for what I had done to them. So I downed a litre of Aquarius (kinda like Gatorade) and went to lie down on the couch for a couple of minutes, knowing that I'd need every ounce of energy I had left to make it up the stairs to my shower. And those stairs, while steep, wouldn't be so bad if I only had to go through them once, but the water heater was acting up. So after noticing that the water refused to warm up, I had to go back down and have a chat with the heater, then head back up again. At this point muscles were aching that I was pretty sure I didn't even have, so after the shower I crawled into bed did the occasional stretch for the muscles I knew how to, and just waited until I could once again stand up.

Still, as much pain as I was in, I was proud of myself for doing it. So, have any of you out there in interwebs-land surprised yourself by running farther than you originally thought? How did you feel afterwards?