A WEEK FROM YESTERDAY!

Well, crap. I had this post all written out, published, commented on by Flo, then I went to change one little word and lost it.

It just goes to show.... I shouldn't edit and re-edit. Especially after something is already posted. You should see how long it takes me to make a 2-line email post acceptable.

Anyway, let me try this again.

This marathon is going to be fun. Here's the course description, including some history of the feud and pointing out some of the feud landmarks we'll see or run past.

Each runner is assigned randomly to be either a Hatfield or a McCoy (unless they're one or the other by birth), and the "family" with the lowest overall running time wins the feud... at least for this year.

I'm a McCoy. If life had worked out differently, I actually might have been. My first love was a McCoy. I don't know if he was the same McCoy family as the feuders, but had our (mutual) crush continued and endured, I might have been a McCoy. I wouldn't be where I am now. I'd be richer.... according to my understanding he's done quite well indeed. I wouldn't be retired (if I had ever worked... I don't know anything about his wife), wouldn't be living and traveling full-time in an RV. My children Valerie, Jonathan and Avery would never have been born; without them there would have been no Collin, Grayson, and Abbie. I wouldn't have lived in Garrett County, MD for 30 years. I'd have lived in 6 countries around the world and I'd be living in Geneva, Switzerland at the moment, not going to Kentucky to run the Hatfield-McCoy Marathon. It was a long time ago, 8th grade and our first couple years of high school. 50 years later, I still dream about him sometimes. I guess you never forget your first love.

Anyway, I'm done training for the marathon. I ran 18 miles last weekend and 10 today. At least, 10 more or less... en route, about a mile and a half out, I discovered my necklace was broken and the silver cross I've rarely taken off in 20 years, since Steve gave it to me that Easter, was gone. So I retraced my steps all the way home, and went out again, retraced, came back, went out again, and on this trip I found it. I was so overcome I picked it up and kissed it. So I looked at my watch, estimated where I'd need to run to to return home with a total of 2 hours, which I would call 10 miles.

MapQuest predicts a 4-and-a-half hour drive down there. This may be a good omen. I have sort of a rule of thumb that says it's reasonable to travel to a race when the travel time is no more than the race itself will take me, more or less. So, it's reasonable to drive half an hour to a 5K; an hour to a 10K; 3-and-a-half hours to an Oly tri; up to 6 hours for a marathon.

So maybe a 4:30 drive prophesies a 4:30 marathon.

Or not.

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You-all will have to take this post with any typos or syntax errors it may contain... I'm not going to take it back again after publishing to fix something and lose it again. It's already lost something in the translation. And gained.... I didn't include the story of the lost cross in the first version.