I’ll be honest: I spent the better part of 15 years actively avoiding running. I was in track in junior high – 1st row, 2nd from the right – but I don’t think that you could call what I did “running”. Mostly it involved “getting out of breath” and “knocking over hurdles”. In high school I had a legitimate excuse to not run – a totally mysterious hairline fracture on my hip of the sort that is most often seen in football players – and that contributed to years of sloth.

What I’m trying to say here is that if you’d told me at any point in the last 18 years that I would be regularly running, much less running because I enjoy it, much less running TEN MILES IN A RACE, there’s no way I would’ve believed you. But that’s what Tina and I are going to do on Sunday.