I relay this to you not to boast, but to remind you the strength of my weakness. The Friday we spoke was a “running day” for me. Unfortunately, a few hours after our conversation, it began raining so hard I couldn’t accurately decipher objects a few feet outside my windows. Worse still, my trusty iPhone SE, with the dope headphone jack, informed me it was 51 degrees, which happens to be the coldest temperature since I arrived in Ted Cruz’s great state a month ago.

No, I didn’t see this as any sort of “challenge.” I saw this as an excuse to push the run to Saturday, maybe even Sunday if the conditions remained unfavorable. I’m telling you, my weakness is so good at negotiating it could convince Kim Jong-un to unilaterally disarm. Just check some of these persuasive arguments:

• Rest may actually make you faster.
• Because you don’t have access to laundry machines/services, you can’t afford to dirty clothes unnecessarily.
• Since wet shoes dry slowly, running today will come with a great cost for the next few days
• You’ll get cold if you run, so you’ll have to shower twice (once when you finish the run and again before bed). That’s wasteful and annoying.
• You already worked out, so you are fine.
• Why did you decide to run 2xon/1xoff? It’s completely arbitrary, so skipping today doesn’t matter.

But then the rain started to slow. I checked the forecast hoping it would show an impending storm and justify all the aforementioned cogence. Nope. Just in case, I dressed as slowly as possible to give the weather time to turn nasty. Nope.

The weakness was, of course, still there as I began running: It’s so cold running slowly is entirely justified … You need your shirt off to run fast … Today is simply not a good day to break records. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it …

I try to wrestle back control: Look at all these fucks tucked away in their warm homes … If I can run fast in this, I’m unstoppable … It’s not actually cold … You are here, be strong …

I run six seconds off my WR pace. It’s an okay run, no joy with the accomplishment or anything like that. There is a tiny bit of satisfaction at beating back the weakness today. It’s this reward, more than anything else, which gets me to do stuff that isn’t particularly enjoyable. Plus, I know that the prize achieved by surrendering to weakness is largely hollow. I try to force myself to remember all of that because the same battle with weakness will emerge again tomorrow, and I know I’ll be tempted again to tap out.