This morning I was very nearly thwarted in my efforts to attend the team run. I live in a guest house and have my own driveway that runs alongside the driveway for the main house. The main house has brand new tenants in it who seem to have a massive number of cars (or else they just have a ton of people staying with them while they get settled). At 4:35 this morning when I left my house to drive to the run, I found that I had been completely blocked into my driveway by one of the four vehicles that were piled in front of the house.

I stood there for several minutes, trying to figure out how on earth to proceed. It was interesting to watch my own discomfort process unfold here. The choice was clear -- I could try to wake up a household of strangers and get them to move their car (very uncomfortable for obvious reasons) or I could give up on attending the team run, go back to bed, and then do a 10-miler on my own once it got light (also uncomfortable, since I'd dragged myself out of bed after very little sleep and was already sunscreened, bodyglided, caffeinated, and ready to go). I thought about how it was raining and I didn't really feel like running in the rain. I thought about how, in spite of having gotten only 4 hours of sleep, I might not be able to go back to sleep because I'd taken two caffeine pills to wake myself up. I thought about what I would have done if this had happened last week for the 20-mile run -- clearly I'd have had to wake them up, because I couldn't have done that run on my own. I thought about how I knew for certain that they had been informed to keep my strip of driveway unblocked, since I was standing right there when our landlady had let them know about this. I thought about the fact that it would get sunscreen and bodyglide in my bed if I gave up and went back to bed.

Eventually, I knocked on their door. It took a few minutes of knocking without response before I realized, cringing internally, that if I was going to commit to waking them up, I needed to commit to loud pounding. So I started pounding on their door. Oh, the weirdness of pounding on the door of total strangers in the middle of the night! I was afraid someone might call the police on me. Finally -- a full 10 minutes after I had first started knocking -- a woman came to the door. I explained the situation very apologetically and once she understood, she sleepily said, "Well, my husband's asleep, so can I just give you the key?" I didn't ask why she couldn't move it herself -- maybe she doesn't drive or something -- because I was already late. So she brought me the key and I moved their truck for them, also weird. At least she wasn't hostile. She didn't seem very happy about being woken up, but apologized for having blocked me in and accepted my apologies for waking her up.

After all that, I zoomed over to the park and made it there in time to hear my route before everyone had left. I ran a pokey-but-consistent 10 miles. It was a mercifully uneventful run after the door pounding incident. There was a little rain, but mostly it was just nice and cool. I was surprised to find how tired my body still was from last Saturday's run; no pain but lots of fatigue in my feet, ankles, knees, and hips. But psychologically, the run felt easy -- regardless of physical difficulty, it's no longer mentally difficult for me to run for two hours. That fact amazes me.

One more team run before Race Weekend...