Wild.

It's happening.  It's happening in 5 days, it really is, and although I feel a need to be surprised, I'm actually not.  I suppose not much surprises me anymore, especially after this wild year. 

This wild, wild year.  Jagged, and a beautiful disaster, just as the song goes.

Number 16 is just going to be so, so fitting.  Number 16 will only have a field of 130 marathoners, and where I normally try to think about who I will be and what I will learn during each one, I'm expecting to be alone for this one.  I will be alone with the 26.2, and I will be happy.  I will be alone on wooded trails, no course support, no T-shirt, no medal, no expo, no spectators...just me, my bib number. my realizations and things learned over the other eight and countless couple thousand training miles this year.  Silence.  Satiety?  Digestion, definitely.  Renewal and reflection.

What an utterly unglued, untamed, unhinged year.  This year will soon morph into a new year of renewed obtuse, where I will have done nine marathons and a Half Ironman in the past 12 months, and I'm excited to roll right into the next dozen months where I will do even more.  January brings new races.  February and March bring a few more marathons, and in the next six months I will have done over twenty.  I want to do 3,000 miles next year and train at high mileage among other goals which will soon be revealed. 

But first, Roxbury will help me finish this year where I've simply shut up and ran, quietly celebrating these victories and toxic situations digested, while others have this need to sound their fanfare of nothing but white noise and blown smoke and lookatmelookatmelookatme.  Perhaps it's the introduction of Lookatmes that have caused me to run the other way lately.  I prefer to now run under the cover of darkness and silence and being unleashed and quiet. I prefer to run silent now during this wild year of being a lunatic and embracing it, rather than surrendering to domesticity and mediocrity.  This wild year that has turned to nightfall, where I've fled from people who have tried to mash me into a mold, to fit their own expectations, and then get upset when they don't get their way because they don't even know which way is their way to run, but yet still think they know something.  Sometimes believing that knowing something when in actuality, it's really nothing is a dangerous, dangerous thing I've learned.  Therefore, Lookatmes are dangerous people.  Justanyones are harmless.

Remember all that bantering about this BIG thing that is about to happen?  Well, I think it has in the past few weeks.  I'm not ready to verbalize it because I'm sitting with my feelings as I tend to do, but I think it's finally arrived and it's bittersweet and my arms are open.  This is all I know right now, and part of the fun is not knowing and enjoying not knowing.  Not everything needs a clear answer or definition or explanation and in fact, some of the most beautiful aspects of life and certain people possess neither; they are anomalies without definition or description or classification.  They just ARE.   Like running, actually; it just IS.  Running is beautiful inside and out and it's sheer beauty to me is felt rather than defined or articulated which makes me know without question it's powerful and real, but simple and without edges.

Enough already though, because I think the purpose of Roxbury is because this year is trying to remind me of one of the brightest lessons I've learned among many:  keep moving forward.  Keep wanting IT.  Run strong and wild, and most importantly:  Run Happy.  Those who are meant to be in my life will love me for this, will want to be there, will show up and can handle it.  In the meantime, off I go into the unknown, not wanting to know, but smiling the whole way.  I'll see you on the other side of this year's number nine, and number 16 forever.