I am (overly) cautious and a worrier by nature. Always have been. With a truly overactive imagination, in any given situation I can come up with a dozen ways that things could go horribly wrong, and then preoccupy myself with thoughts about how best to avert disaster. My family knows this and, my son especially, will exploit it for his own entertainment (“Look Mom – no hands!” … and then watch as my freak out begins and I turn fifty shades of pale.)

I am a list maker and a planner. A habitual rule-follower, most of my life has been spent traveling a straight and narrow path and trying to avoid temptations to stray outside of the lines. While constraining in other contexts, these Type A tendencies have served me particularly well in training. With a well-vetted marathon plan in hand, I plunge ahead with a good deal of confidence that if I check all of the boxes, if I hit all of my runs and paces, then come race day I will be prepared for the task at hand. In week 8 of training, I had every intention of drawing on this compulsive desire (need?) to click off all of the workouts, and to stay entirely on point, to avoid otherwise inevitable vacation detours.