Perspective

I had big plans today. I was going to ramp up my running and do ten miles this morning. I was going to do my resistance training and then run a very easy ten miles in a minimum of two hours. The Gate River Run is five or six weeks away and I want to see where I am. Some gastrointestinal distress killed that almost immediately. I struggled through everything: my pushups, my pull-ups, and my sit-ups. I got about three and a half miles into my run before I was forced to stop. I started to get really frustrated but then remembered that a month ago I would have been done with my workout and completely spent. Today, my muscles and cardiovascular system were ready to go, but my stomach wasn’t. I did all I could and I can’t reasonably expect myself to do more. All I can do is watch what I eat and try again tomorrow.


I’m cutting the exercise post short because I saw something a little bit disturbing on television. LMJ and I were watching a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episode where Donald has to help some (other) ducks fly south for the winter. I understand – you should too – that I’m going to get a little bit existential about a children’s cartoon but it’s weighing on my mind. Cutting to the chase, Donald helps these non-speaking, apparently non-sentient, ducks by leading them south in an airplane. Is Donald a duck god? Or did he and the rest of the Mickey Mouse Club characters make a pact with the devil for self-awareness and speech in exchange for the loss of their natural animal advantages? The ducks heading south were much smaller than Donald, Mickey, and Professor von Drake (I don’t know where Daisy was), and they were naked. This would make Donald a four and a half or five foot tall talking duck that can’t fly, but is seen as some type of guiding force by a bunch of directionally challenged ducks, to whom he feels a certain obligation. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, and maybe I should stop eating mushrooms I find in the backyard. That would probably fix both of today’s issues.