Countdown: 16 days.

Thursday, 7:58 a.m., 43 degrees, gorgeous fall day. Anthony Street, 5k.

Friday, 7 a.m., 37 degrees, gray, chilly. Complete Stockade-athon course, with a little extra (see below), 9 1/2 miles.

Sticking to the movie quote theme, my tormented mind kept bouncing this one off the inside of my skull this morning: "I knew I could do it ... because I'd already done it!" Or something like that. It's one of the last lines from "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." He's referring to being able to produce the very powerful and exceedingly difficult-to-master Patronus Charm to ward off Dementors. The fact that I know this, and just got off some site called mugglenet.com trying (and failing) to retrieve the quote in its pristine state, shows the depths of geekdom that I am capable of. I figure, after the picture they ran of me on the sports cover last Sunday from the UAlbany basketball practice, I cannot sink any lower, so welcome to my world. Check your capes, wands and owls at the door.

The less said about Thursday's workout, the better. It was a beautiful day, I felt great overall, but my hips didn't want to fall in line with the program, and my lack of rhythm was further hampered by morning traffic at Maxon Road (both ways), and Nott and Union streets. Just brutal. I'm rarely out of bed later than 8 a.m. or so, but I don't usually run until hours later, so I'm trying to acclimate myself to that schedule, since the Stockade-athon starts at 9 a.m. this year.

That said, 7 a.m. on a Friday was a lousy time to try to run the full Stockade-athon course for the first time ever (I'd never even run a workout longer than 8 1/2 miles in my life), but I was hemmed in by the schedule, hoping to run in the Central Park 5k race on Sunday, but not wanting to do it on the heels of a 15k workout on Saturday, when it's supposed to rain, anyway.

So, off we went. It was still a little dark in Central Park, and chilly and blustery, but I was dressed for it, and at no point did the wind seem to be a huge handicap. I played it pretty slowly and had to dodge cars and pedestrians all over the place. The downhill on Nott Street is over before you know it, but then I just missed the light at Erie Boulevard and had to jerk around trying to get across. Another beautiful rhythm destroyed.

I finally got going again somewhere on Washington Avenue, only to just miss the light on Erie again. Profanity ensued. I jogged almost all the way to Quizno's looking for a gap in the traffic, then had to jog back uphill to State Street.

Caught the Nott Terrace light, blessedly, on the noggin. The State Street hill got me pretty good, but it wouldn't have been too bad if not for some left heel pain that creeped in and didn't go away until I was well into Central Park. Nice canopy of orange leaves along the lane into Vale Cemetery, signaling not death, but a slow rebirth for me, or so I thought at first. The Bradley Boulevard hill isn't nearly as tough as State, it's just kind of annoying, and the heel issue wouldn't go away, so I was going pretty slowly at this point.

Those two hard, short downhills in Central Park - I don't like them. I kept expecting the tops of my femurs to blast through my pelvis up into my ribcage, and my left heel kept wondering what I ever did to it to deserve this treatment.

So it took a little while to get it all back together, but eventually it did. My heel quieted down, my legs and feet started feeling better, and by the time I got back onto Central Parkway, I was rallying. You can only hope that the trees lining the Rose Garden entrance are still in color on Nov. 8, because they were exquisite, orange with subtle tinges of red.

Iroquois Lake - forget it, I love that path around there. If you can't find some hidden reserve when you're making that circle, you truly have nothing left.

I always knew the Stockade-athon distance wouldn't be a problem for me. Yes, the potential for biomechanical issues in my left foot is very real, and will continue to be, the longer I go, but everything else - legs, lungs, head, spirit - is with this program. Still, having done the course once now, on my own, gives me just that little extra boost of confidence. There are no secrets anymore. That's why Harry Potter kept popping into my head. In "Azkaban", he has to summon the Patronus Charm at a key moment, but through a plot twist that involves time travel, etc., he had tried it once before under exactly the same circumstances. So he knew he could do it the second time. Spoiler alert: ... wait, damn, that was supposed to come BEFORE I revealed the plot twist, wasn't it? I'm new at this. Well, just twirl Hermione Granger's time travel thingy and go back to a point when you hadn't read this blog post yet. You might have been already thinking along those lines, anyway.

After finishing the course, I felt like a million dollars. Everything was strong, loose and solid. My mind had found some happy, meditative, contemplative state. I got in the Express checkout line at Price Chopper and it took 10 minutes for the three people in front of me to clear. The guy in front of me kept shaking his head because of the slow woman at the front of the line. Meanwhile, he's got 23 items (I counted) in the 15-item line, apparently under the delusion that if you have multiples of the same product (like six huge cans of Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, three boxes of Fiber One), it counts as one. Anyone who wants a full rundown of his stuff can call me at 395-3146. So now I'm getting all stiff, and my nose is running, and ... wait, what were we talking about?