...and she knows how to use them. 

To run a marathon.

Some of you may remember the backstory to this. I missed Boston this past April because of a stress fracture in my foot. What you may not have realized is that you can't just ''run Boston next year'' to make up for the missed year; you need to qualify. By not running Boston in April, I had no marathon that would qualify me for next year's Boston.

To make matters more complicated, registration for next year's Boston begins in a couple of weeks, and will fill up almost immediately. 

I decided that when I began running again in early June, after my 8-week fracture layoff, I would try to target one of the few late-summer marathons on the calendar, and, if everything went absolutely perfectly, I might be able to squeeze in a half-decent training cycle and run a qualifying time in order to register for Boston.

Well, everything didn't go perfectly - few training cycles ever do - and I had some lingering niggles, but I bit the bullet and tried anyway.

On Friday, we packed the dogs into the car and drove 800km to Québec City, and this morning I ran the marathon.

It wasn't pretty, and the last half can be generously described as a clusterf*ck an exercise in tenacity (the 2km long, steep descent at 30km destroyed my already-unhappy hamstring, and the last 10k was ugly ugly ugly). 

But I hung in there and got a BQ-10+, which in layman's terms is a golden ducat to Boston 2017.

I need to thank David and Kathy for guiding me through the Boston injury and its consequences; without your wise advice and care I would have done something really stupid. And Dan...for all those day-off Fridays you spent getting things back in working order again. And Tim, who put up with the missing Boston sulks, the whining about training all through the oppressive heat of summer, the whining about sore this or gnarly that, the countless wanna see my blisters, the rationale of making a 1600km round trip and spending 3 nights in a hotel in order to run 42 km (and then whine), the 4:30am where the *&&?&?% are my socks temper tantrum before I headed for the marathon bus this morning, and all the other neuroses that go with living with a runner. Thank you all for believing in me. You're what got me through those last, painful miles.