Given my appreciation of the Clif Bar (and the lack of a banana alternative) I’m going to run with the Clif Bar Pace Team at Grandma’s Marathon this summer. Since I’m almost always carrying one with me, maybe this time they’ll help carry me to a Boston qualifying time. They were at Disney World, too, and even though I wasn’t signed up to run with them their presence on the course really helped.

Now I just need to train up to that pace.

The other day I ran 38 miles for the first time. I was aiming for 40, so I guess that run wasn’t quite done yet, either. Cutting it short was the right decision, though. I’ll get to 40 eventually.

Writing a dissertation isn’t like a marathon. It’s like a series of marathons. Or maybe just one ultramarathon. And just like a 100-miler, I haven’t done it yet, but I know I will.

Then, at lunch we tried the new dessert at Olive Garden, some sort of Italian donuts with chocolate sauce for dipping (which I avoided.) It was actually a surprisingly large dessert.

Finally, for dinner I took a stab at making shepherd’s pie for the first time and it turned out pretty well.

As for the Super Bowl, I had no real stake in it, so no disappointment there.

• swim laps at least twice a week…
• …so I can run the Quad Cities Triathlon in a triathlon (Quad Cities is out because there’s a marathon the same day)
• eat less fried food
• communicate better
• write more

With one official marathon behind me, one just around the corner, and a couple unofficial ones under my belt, I’ve started to think about my options for the future. More marathons, of course, but what else? Then I remembered reading about 50 mile races. Sounds crazy, right? Yeah, until I remembered that there was a time when a marathon sounded crazy, back when running 10 miles on a regular basis was tough. Now I’m doing twice that, so a race that’s a bit less than twice that doesn’t seem too impossible anymore. Really really difficult, yeah, but not impossible.

Or there’s the possibility of running an Iron Man someday. To do that, of course, I’d have to start with triathlons. Olympic triathlons are about 1 mile swimming, 25 miles biking, and a tad over 6 miles running. Only problem would be the swimming at this point. Going from that to a full Iron Man (2.4 mile swim, 112 mile ride, and a marathon run) sounds crazy at first, but again, so did a marathon… Plus, swimming indoors would keep me out of the cold weather. Just saying. We’ll see.

In other news: I’ve finally found a stand-in for the muesli I so loved in Germany, and I once again have a desktop PC that works.