Long-time Brain Terminal reader Robert Sciolino sends this thought for the day:

Everyday I go for a ten kilometer run. I hate running. It is more time efficient than biking right now as I look to destroy as many calories as possible in as short a period as possible before getting on the bike and renewing my bike race goals.

The first two miles are torturous. I ask myself repeatedly, “why am I doing this...it hurts...I hate it, there must be a better way”. I look for excuses to stop. I see rational reasons not to do it. I develop pains in my knees and ankles (that some how go a way when ignored). I then remember that this pain is no where near the pain I have when in the middle of a interval training session on the bike.

And yet, I lose another notch in the belt. I feel like a human being all day long rather than a couch potato. I can feel my heart pumping strong and my legs feel as they did when I was eighteen years-old, in fact, as the weeks go on, I feel like an eighteen- year-old all over. My body gets stronger. I’m slowly becoming an athlete again. The bike and the racing inch closer.

I strain to see the big picture while I struggle through the first two miles. It is very easy and even rational to view my pain as meaningless and maybe even detrimental to my goals as I torture myself through it. It is very easy to dismiss my actions as masochistic. I can easily see alternatives such as the new diet drugs out there that magically convert millions of years of physiological evolution into lost weight by a simple swallow (or how about gastric by-pass!). It is VERY easy to forget how my body become stronger as it anticipates more pain tomorrow and actually produces less when tomorrow comes (funny how that works).

And then I see the naysayers about Iraq and Afganistan and I understand. Democracy and freedom have responsibility as twin brothers, and people who have never been free struggle to learn that principle, and many of us see the struggle and look for the magic pill that easily converts former slaves into responsible free people.

I really do understand the intellectual couch potatoes...

...every day I begin my run. I hate running.