Damian and Lani playing in the back garden.
27 February 2008

When Matt was a teenager, he participated in a 22-mile race-walk a couple of times, so he has more experience in long-distance endurance sports than I do.  He didn’t train for the race-walks; he was a teenager and naturally had that boundless energy.  But he did say that the hardest part was the middle.  He said the beginning and end are easy, but the middle is tedious.  He said in regards to this up-coming marathon, “We are training for the middle.”

This morning, while eating cheese and bread with my gorgeous son, I was thinking about how we were so excited for the first two weeks of gym and training for this marathon, and then — very easily, mind you — we dropped gym completely for three weeks.  The excitement and newness had quickly worn off.

We had entered “the middle.”  The middle of most things are tedious: training towards a physical goal, sewing, wood-working projects, curling Ariel’s hair (which we did last night by the way; we being “Matt and I,” so Matt has another experience tucked under his belt that he never even conceived of before having a daughter and a wife).

So let’s salute the character-building tedious middle, the wall that’s a pain in the ass to climb.  You are the true test.