Pain or Pleasure?

As many of you are probably aware, I do some of my best thinking in the shower. It is one of the few places a man can go to be alone for a few minutes. Except for here where you get to shower with 10 of your closest friends. It is not as bad as basic training where you have to share a shower head as we have individual stalls, but they are in a big room and you have to see other dudes naked, which is never any fun. Anyway, I was thinking through my week this morning and had a startling discovery, I have 2 concurrent activities scheduled this Sunday morning at 0600. Hard to believe I know. Here is the breakdown.

First, there is a road race every year in Washington, D.C. called The Army Ten Miler. According to the website it is the biggest 10 mile run in the world, drawing 24,000 participants this year. Here is a little bit about the run from the website:

• 10-Miler Shadow Runs - A number of 10-mile shadow runs are being coordinated overseas to run in conjunction with the official, 8-Oct-06 Army Ten-Miler race in Washington, DC at the Pentagon. These 10-mile shadow runs support soldiers that serve in harm's way and demonstrate the Army bond around the world.Army Ten-Miler Supports Soldiers - All proceeds from the Army Ten-Miler go to soldier and soldier family MWR programs. Read more at Army Ten-Miler Proceeds Help Others.

LSA Anaconda is hosting one of the Shadow Races, which I signed up for when I got back here from leave. Now, I was running quite a bit before I left for home, and was up to over 20 miles a week with a long run between 7 and 9 miles on the weekend. As you can probably imagine, I had better things to do at home then go run, so I only ran a total of 7 miles in 3 weeks. I've only had 2 weeks to re-prepare, and with my body adjusting to the time zone here pretty much all of last week, I haven't put very many miles in yet. But, I can still struggle through and am not necessarily worried about finishing, but probably will have a hard time with my goal of running at 9:00 pace. Usually once I commit to something I like to follow through on it.

Second, as I realized in the aforementioned shower, the Huskers play Iowa State this weekend, and of course the powers to be have scheduled another night game, which means we'll be getting up in the middle of the night at 3:00am Sunday (we started daylight savings time here so we are currently only 8 hours ahead which is really taxing my math skills). BTW, it would be nice if we could have a noon or 1:00 kickoff every once in a while which would be 10:00 our time. Can somebody arrange this for me? After the dismal performance of the defense this last week, I am fully expecting that we'll be in another tight game this weekend. So, around 5:00ish, when I should be heading to the race, the Huskers will be mired in an epic battle with the Cyclones, probably somewhere in the 3rd quarter. Husker football has been taken to another level this year for us fans over here this year, as it is often the highlight of the week and really gives us something to look forward to.

So, you can see my dilemma. I would like to participate in both activities, but probably can't. On one hand, I love my Huskers and that is pretty much the highlight of the week. Plus, there is a chance that AFN will try not to screw us over this week and televise the game and not baseball (jerks). I can say that I would watch the 1st half, and then leave, which would be okay if we were up 28 to 0, but if the game is close at all I doubt that will happen, you know peer pressure and all. On the other hand, I've told people I was going to run and it is one of the things I've been looking forward to since my JAG buddy from Florida that was stationed here told me about it when I first got here. Plus my running buddy and good friend back home did a half marathon a few weeks ago so I have the innate desire to keep up with the joneses so to speak. What do you think????