The Unanswerable Question

It happens every race, every year.  You hope it doesn't, but there it is, just like clockwork.  This time, it took the form of a text from a friend:

"Good luck in the race!  Are you ready?"

Now, those weren't his exact words, but they are the idea behind The Great Unanswerable Question.  It's the same question that will HAUNT you, in its various forms:

Did I log enough miles?
Did I do enough strength training?
Did I cross-train?  What IS cross-training?
Should I change my diet?  Do I HAVE a diet?  Is it good enough?
Should I eat more carbs?  Fewer carbs?  Or is it "less" carbs? (NOTE:  I have never seen a carb, and thus do not know, grammatically speaking, if they are individually counted, or grouped.  But I digress...)

The Great Unanswerable leads, inevitably, to what that great sage and eminent philosopher, not to mention fantastic poet, Shel Silverstein, called "The Whatif Song."

Last night, while I lay thinking here,
Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
And pranced and partied all night long
And sang their same old Whatif song

You've been there, when it's the night before the race, and your mind is already running the race, or, worse, NOT running the race because a herd of wildebeests escaped from the local zoo and trampled you, injuring your ankle (don't ask, just understand, my family has a strange history with wildebeests).  Or maybe it's the night before the test, and you wonder if you took ALL the notes necessary...or it's the night before that big meeting, and you aren't sure if you backed up the backup of your presentation...

We KNOW this is coming.  We know it like we know the sun will rise tomorrow (hopefully during, and not before, my last longish run before race day).  We gather together our mental armor, our pithy quotes and sayings.  We scour YouTube like it's a sacred site, searching every variation of "motivation" for that perfect video, like this one:

Get Up Get Moving!  (sorry, that's not the name of the video, but it works, no?)

But in the end, it's just you and your training, or lack thereof.  And believe me, you WILL remember every morning you hit snooze too many times, every workout skipped with "I cut the grass, that counts", every second helping of dessert justified with an "extra mile" you didn't run.

Here's the best part, though:  NONE OF THAT CRAP MATTERS.

I say again:  NONE OF IT MATTERS.

And I'll tell you why...next week, when I write my last words before hitting the streets of Chicago for the Men's Health Urbanathlon.

Until next time,

Tom
2T4:7