Complain, so much easier ...

Jakeb has been out of town for the last couple of days turkey hunting with his Grandpa (Andrea’s dad). He was planning to run in the hill country while he was gone but I asked him about it when he got home and he said he had not ran at all. He had some lame excuse about it raining or something to that effect.

Last night I told him, “Get ready because in the morning I am dragging your sleepy rear end out of bed and we’re running three.”

So as promised at 5am I went into his room and shook him and said “Jake, get up and let’s go run.”

I heard a muffled “Uhhhhh ….” from under the covers.

I said, “I don’t think so, get up and let’s go run. While you’re at it put on a long sleeve shirt because it is a little cool.”

“Uhhhhh …”

He came down stairs griping about running in the cold and moaned as he put his shoes on. He said “ooouuuch” as we started the first stretch.

We stepped out of the house and started walking to warm up. Jakeb asked, “Can we start running now? It’s cold and I want to run to warm up.” What he didn’t say was that he wanted to start running so that the running would be over sooner.

We took off at a moderate pace running what we call the Oyster Creek route. As we moved through the run the pace got progressively faster. By the time we hit the 1st mile marker we were running at a decent clip, faster than my marathon pace. I didn’t start my watch so I do not have splits but I asked Jake at a mile and a half if he was okay with the pace and he said “yeah”. And that was it.

So we ran without slowing, on the sidewalk through the moss covered trees on Oyster Creek Drive, past an old man on his morning walk. As we turned the corner onto Sycamore a third of a mile from home I picked it up a notch and Jakeb stayed with me. We still aren’t killing it but after all of the complaining I heard before the run I was impressed.

About a hundred yards from the end of the Oyster Creek route Jakeb said “That felt awesome! Good run!”

I said, “HA! Now you see why I forced you to get out of bed.”

We got home and Jakeb took and shower and went back to sleep. - My son the paradox.