TITLE: Two
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 12, 2009  8:15 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
<P ALIGN="right"><EM>
Two can be as bad as one  <BR/>
It's the loneliest number since the number one  <BR/><BR/>
-- Three Dog Night</A></EM></P>

Two is the number of times I have run since Tuesday
afternoon.  It is also the the number of times I
ran between Tuesday and December 21, and twice as
many times as I ran in the entire month of January.

I was so excited when I ran three miles on January
30 that I nearly blogged
<A HREF="http://www.threedognight.com/l_one.html">
   One</A>,
because it had been one month since my previous
run, and my only run in January.  (I'll talk about
that December 30 in an upcoming Running Year in
Review.)

Good news: The two runs this week have not led to
the symptoms that knocked out most of November
and December.  That's especially good news given
that months of medical testing have failed to
find their cause.  At this point, I have the
most accurate snapshot of my body and its health
ever: blood tests, metabolic tests, stress tests,
sleep tests,  gastrointestinal scopes, an MRI of
my head, an ultrasound of my internal organs,
and finally a marrow biopsy.  The tests came back
negative, which is positive -- except for finding
a cause.  I'm ready for the symptoms to disappear
and become a mystery of the past.

So two runs in a week with good health feels great.
I ran only three miles each time, slow but not so
slow that I am setting
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-04.html#e2007-04-11T07_41_41.htm">
   negative PRs</A>.
My legs feel good, ready for more.  I'll wait
until Sunday or so before trying that.

Ever the optimist, earlier this month I signed
up to run a spring race.  My running buddy has
wanted to run the
<A HREF="http://www.500festival.com/marathon/">
   Indy 500 Mini Marathon</A>
for a few years.  I'm an Indianapolis native who
grew up amid the mystique of the Indy 500 but
who didn't run while I lived there.  I was
easily sold.

The race -- America's largest half marathon and
one of the five or six largest races of any
distance -- is May 2, so I have my work cut out
for me.  At this point I don't envision myself
"racing" this one.  Instead I'll use it as a
goal to drive my return to running this spring,
and then on race day as a symbolic return to
the real thing.  Running for fun can be fun,
and it will let me know whether I have what
it takes to get back into serious mileage and
some real racing later.  Maybe even an autumn
marathon.
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