Yup, that's me, grabbing my butt cheeks

A friend asked me a tough question: "What makes someone want to run a half-marathon and have to pay for it, too?"
It's a good question, one that I think about every time I reach the eight-kilometre mark on our route. I'm good for eight kilometers; everything after that hurts.
My husband and I are training for a half-marathon race in Toronto in September. It costs $75 for each of us to enter, plus travelling costs, and we'll need a hotel room the night before the race.
I ran my first half-marathon – 21.1 kilometres - last year in Picton. Nothing can top that experience. The air felt clean and easy on my asthmatic lungs. And everyone in the town comes out and stands along the route to cheer you on, offer you juice and homemade cookies and wave signs that encourage you to keep going.
Training for that run was one of the toughest things I’ve done. By the time we got up to the 15-kilometre mark in our training runs, I was running so slowly I was basically walking and my glutes (my bum cheeks) were so sore, I was running around Kingston, for everyone to see, holding each cheek with my hands.
I vowed this year I'd be better prepared. We started training earlier and I’ve been doing hill and interval work.
Slowly, over the past few weeks, I've noticed the runs becoming easier. When we set off our latest run, I knew it was going to be special. My lungs felt great. My legs felt great. I felt like I could just keep going and going and going.
Our training schedule dictated that we had to do 15 kilometres.
Somewhere just after 10 kilometres, we noticed the skies darkening. And soon I was getting wet. I thought it was my husband's sweat hitting me in the face. If only.
It was droplets of rain, the size of cherries.
By kilometre 11, it was pouring. We had ponds in our shoes. Our clothes were slicked to us. We were going to keep running, but then the thunder and lightning started.
We had to head home.
By the time we pulled into our driveway, we had finished 12 kilometres. We were supposed to do three more - but how? When you're training for these runs, it's the last few kilometres that hurt the most, so the pain was just about to come. I felt like we were throwing away 12 kilometres.
As the thunder boomed, I yelled to my husband that I had a plan.
"We can run on the spot for 18 minutes, that's how long another three kilometres would take us!"
He stared blankly at me, droplets rolling off his nose.
"Like doggie paddling, but running, but in the garage," I explained.
We were like fish out of water. We had nowhere to go. No way to run safely with the lightning show. And my hubby was not having any of my running-on-the-spot shenanigans.
So, now, next weekend, we have to attempt 15 kilometres again.
If we get too far behind in our training, I'll be that girl, jogging through Kingston, barely holding on, holding her bum cheeks.
What makes me want to run a half-marathon and have to pay for it, too?

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Worms + coffee = Delish!

For most of the four-hour ride from the cottage to home, I thought about people who make neon advertising signs.
Do they ever feel like they should suggest that perhaps a customer's sign isn't exactly the most appealing?
One of the things I love about going to my parents' cottage is that they are surrounded by villages and hamlets that seem to be untouched by progress.
Most of these places don't even have a chain coffee shop. These quaint stops are still dominated by the ma-and-pa gas station/restaurant/corner store/coffee stop.
I love my grande decafs but it's liberating going into a roadside shack to grab a coffee from a carafe that could be 24 hours old. Live a little. It's part of the adventure of a vacation.
But this time, on the way home, I noticed something about many of these little stops - something I've never noticed. We pulled up to the first stop. We were just 20 minutes into our four-hour drive: I know they have coffee here. I've come here for our boat gas for decades.
There was a neon sign in the window: COFFEE & WORMS.
Maybe it was the winding cottage road. Maybe it was that I had too much syrup on my french toast that morning. Maybe I was dreading leaving serenity. For whatever reason, my stomach flipped when I saw the combo.
Years ago, when I was only about 10 years old, we were having a family dinner at the cottage. We used to have this glass jug in the fridge that stored our drinking water. The container had a red plastic flip top and was decorated in red strawberries and a swirling green vine. Once, at dinner, my mom asked me to go to the fridge and get the water. I pulled it out and discovered a metre-long worm floating in the jug.
To this day, the only explanation is that a very smart, very conniving worm opened the top of the styrofoam cup we got from Big Jer's Bait Shop, climbed through the dirt and moss and mountains of other creatures we were going to hook to go fishing, inched his way up from the bottom shelf in the fridge door to the top shelf in the main part of the fridge, slithered over the strawberry water jug, opened its little red lid and cannon-balled inside.
It's the only explanation.
So seeing COFFEE & WORMS made my stomach flip. Drinking worms. Ugh.
The next stop also had a neon sign: COFFEE + LIVE BAIT. (Better than dead bait, I suppose.)
The final stop also had a neon sign in its window: COFFEE + WORMS + GAS. (Better than coffee + worms = gas, I suppose.)
But it was here I got my coffee. A medium-bodied coffee with earthy undertones, I'd say.

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