Note: I’m writing this post with an ice pack on my bare inner thigh, so don’t expect smiles and rainbows, people. More like expletives and martyrdom.

Saturday was good. I drove to Boston for a beautiful, gentle run on the water, then I drove home. In my aged, yet functional, car. Then it all went to hell. Sunday I woke up to someone stabbing the living shit out of my inner thigh. Some invisible bastard who preys on the adductors of nice runners who dare to enjoy a beautiful, gentle run on the water in Boston.

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Henry’s new favorite topics are Botox and professional bull riding. That’ll teach me to more closely monitor both my mouth and my Sunday afternoon TV habits. The boy has made it to kindergarten without picking up any of my foul language, but I mention Botox once and he’s hooked on it. He wants me to scrub off the tattoo, yet inject botchilism into my forehead to get rid of Mama’s angry face? Yup, he’s a fan.

I have no idea what the bullriding obsession is about. Kid likes cattle.

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Last night I went out for tapas with one of my favorite people. Over figs wrapped in bacon (orgasmic, yes), we unpacked the condition of the Mom qua Athlete. We came around to our need to have a project going. Something that makes us think, troubleshoot, work, and reach a gratifying outcome. A project that is a work of both art and science, one requiring creativity and playfulness balanced by logic and strategy. Not an experiment, an analytic quandary that gets unriddled and as a result, unfolds like a perfectly crafted novel. Kind of like solving those blasted GRE analysis questions, only, you know, not a total bloody waste of a Saturday morning. Not that we ever get this kind of project. We just want to have one. Scrapbooking, cooking, needlepoint, and good God, cleaning–none of that will do it.

Training. Training is the project we get. Only now our self training has become insufficient so we’re out training other people. Megalomaniacs unite.

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I think I’ve struck a chord. Scrolling down my blog today, as I do when I’m feeling more vain than usual, I noticed that my MILF Effect post has been viewed by twice as many people as any other post in the last couple weeks. Hm. I’m a little apprehensive that the sorts of people who google ‘MILF’ are now reading my blog, in which case I would like to state to all the skeevy people out there that I am a total prude and this is a wholesome web site for running enthusiasts, a site that only occasionally and comedically uses words like ’slut’ and ‘f#ck.’

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My ego wishes I could go on at length about it, but since it appears in the magazine of a Competitor competitor (couldn’t resist that one), I’ll just briefly mention that I hope you pick up a copy of the March issue of Runner’s World, which hit the newsstands yesterday. Not only is Kara Goucher lookin’ fierce on the cover, but I have an essay titled “Hell Week” appearing in the Life and Times column. Thanks so much for being the readers who have helped me reach this level in my writing. It’s a very good day today.

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As much as I’d love my own personal cheerleader to accompany me on every single run (or hell, wherever I go), for the most part, coaches and run-of-the-mill athletes don’t get together all that often. I email my coach almost every day, to the extent that he might think I’m stalking him, which isn’t altogether untrue– just not icky and psychotic. In any event, he doesn’t seem skeeved out by me because Jack very generously offered to meet me for a track workout yesterday morning, since I’ve been doing speed work alone on my treadmill for a month. As entertaining as Ellen Degeneres is for company on these runs, she doesn’t usually respond when I yell out, “What was that split?!”

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Runners love hype, and we loooove to spin race legends like they’re epic myths with fire-breathing dragons at every other mile marker. We try to reinforce each other’s potential and efficacy while talking a big story of races that will probably, definitely kill you. This is the kind of reputation that the Boston Prep 16-miler wields around New England. This event is the cliche lover’s fantasy. If races had levels akin to the terror alert system (and the way we hype them, they might as well), it would be in the red. People talk about this race like it’s Leadville, and the race’s organizers from the Greater Derry Track Club even muse on the hype with their elevation-chart:

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Xenia tagged me in the 10-things-that-make-you-happy meme, but since a) I coincidentally did a similar post a few weeks ago and b) just bought Barbara Ehrenreich’s book on how happiness is overrated, I decided to make a different list of books that are really important to me. But then something happened that made me really happy, for reasons I can’t figure out, so then I was back to the original idea.

So, 10 things that make me happy right now…

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How much is your run worth to you, lady?

That’s basically the question my gym posed this morning. Citing the economy, the gym decided to start charging for the childcare that it had, up til now, offered gratis. No more free rounds of “Did your H1N1 vaccine work?” in the playroom petri dish for this mom and her boy.

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I am not a sex kitten. Most of the week, I schlep around town in fuzzy Merrell clogs and fleece sweatpants from Horny Toad. The pants have never elicited the response implied by their brand. When I’m feeling saucy, I break out a pair of jeans and my Dansko clogs for a bit of a heel.

The woman with the red boots and the blog littered with double entendres? That, my friends, is the result of the MILF Effect caused by running.

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