Among the mistakes I’ve learned from: Finagling the water backpack so it doesn’t bother me when I run. (Also, not pictured: Running at night is no longer something that is good for me.)

(Sunday Paper, Year VIII, Issue 34)

There was an instance early in the year, before everything went upside down with the 2023 New York Mets, that felt significant.

It was the third week of the season against the team that knocked them out of the playoffs last year.

The game was close in the bottom of the 9th and with the Mets showing signs of coming back, the Padres’ closer struck out two Mets - one a veteran and one a rookie.

I wrote that down because it felt to me like a big-time learning moment that, if the same situation presented itself later in the year, the two players, one who’d been around for years and another who was around for just months, wouldn’t repeat.

This was supposed to be a really fun summer where I was going to write about the Mets and my marathon training and draw parallels between the highs and lows of the long season along the same timeline of the training process.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

I thought that moment I mentioned above was significant because you make certain mistakes or you fail in some pursuit - whether it’s baseball or running a marathon or anything else - that turn out to be worth it because you learn something.

And the next time you approach the situation differently, hopefully apply what you learned from the last time, and you find success. Or, at least, you improve.

I have thought about that Mets moment often these past four months…because there was never significant improvement on the Mets end.

As it turns out, maybe it was in fact learning moment - but one for me that I overlooked. Maybe I should have realized in that moment that the Mets would be overmatched all year.

But there was part of me in the back of my mind that felt maybe because they came out of the gate so fast last year that they were approaching this season a little more slowly and it was going to come together over the final couple of months.

Max Scherzer had been giving up a lot of homers - maybe he was saving his arm a bit for August and September.

As it turns out, the Mets traded Scherzer and a bunch of other players at the trade deadline, so we’ll never know how these final couple of months would have played out. They essentially traded an outside chance at winning this year for a more solid chance at being competitive for years to come.

It was a smart baseball move, but it stinks as a fan of this year’s team.

If they were saving themselves for a run, well, they ran out of time.

I tell you all of this because, I guess, although the Mets season has gone off the rails, my marathon training hasn’t.

I’m still working through the missteps and trying to do better.

I remember what went wrong when I ran in February and I’m trying to have a better race in six weeks.

That’s one thing I like about doing all of this running - the Mets, more often than not, disappoint me. And I have no control over that.

But with running, it’s all me - I am the one who can control the outcome.

I wish the culmination of my training was going to coincide with a successful culmination of the 2023 Mets season.

But at least I have the opportunity to make it a better October for myself than if I was solely relying on the Mets.

And in order to do that, I still have some time.

What I’ve Been Enjoying

We got a new blender recently and sometimes it’s not until you get a new kitchen gadget (I am having trouble remembering the word for a kitchen application - not a utensil but a _____) that you realize how poorly the old one was performing. (Oh. Appliance. I remembered hours later.)

I kind of put the final nail in the coffin of the old blender after I had some really good falafel and tried to recreate it myself and made a messy concoction because the blender didn’t really blend it.

I haven’t tried to make falafel again with the new blender - I will, don’t you worry - but we have had some pretty good ice cream milkshakes and breakfast smoothies.

Notes

*This week’s long run was an 18-miler on Saturday. This has been a weird training cycle. I am following a different program than I have before and it calls for a lot of my runs to be done slowly. I’m finding that I am running more - in other words, this 18-miler I definitely walked less than other 18-mile runs I’ve done in the past - but the pace is so much slower. I input a goal time for the program that I don’t possibly see how I’m going to hit…but maybe I’ll be conditioned to push it more on race day? I don’t know. But…I guess it’s another chance to learn.

*I did get a bunch more streets done around Framingham on Saturday, and one of the problems I was trying to prevent by doing more runs on the Esplanade in Boston was dealing with hills. Saturday I ran a LOT of hills in Framingham, and that might have skewed my 18-mile time a bit. I might have to move the rest of my long runs back to the Boston riverfront to simulate Chicago because I am not sure I should be running this many hills. That said, I still felt pretty strong at the end, so maybe it will pay off?

*I rewarded myself for 18 miles with a lunch burrito, as I am wont to do. Jersey Mike’s and burritos are my long run prizes.

*Oh, hey, if you haven’t donated and want to, a reminder that I am running the Chicago Marathon to benefit Ronald McDonald House Charities, and you can contribute to that cause at this link. We’re just $200 away from my fundraising goal!

*The new planner is going very well so far, thanks for asking. Filling it up with the things that need to be done.

*I don’t know that I do social media right. But I’m trying. I put together a reel on the Instagram page after my 18-mile run. I’m going to try to do that more. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to see what I’m putting out there.