Two months ago I signed up for a 5K mud run. It’s a few days before my birthday and I thought it would be a cool way to celebrate. The plan was to prove that as I hit the age of 41 I was still a bad-ass.
When I signed up I was working out pretty regularly, going to the gym, running on the treadmill. In the air conditioning. With a TV in front of me. Not at all a real-world running on pavement experience.
It sounded like a good idea at the time.
Of course, within days it got insanely hot outside, I got busy at work and I needed to put in some overtime and then I got a cold. In two months I’ve only seriously trained a handful of times.
Fast forward to this week….
The run is this Saturday and tonight was the first time in a couple of weeks that I was able to get out and train. The course is going to be pretty hilly so I planned a run that’s about 2.5 miles mostly uphill.
It started out okay, but really only because the first half mile was flat.
As soon as I got to the hills it turned ugly. The reality is, the hill wasn’t all that steep. But as far as I was concerned it was like scaling Mt. Everest.
As I moved upwards my legs felt like uncoordinated stumps and my lungs burned. But I put my head down and trudged up the hill. I grunted and heaved and tried to settle into an easy pace, but I just couldn’t get comfortable. My shoulders were up in my ears so I tried to relax them, but my elbows splayed out in this weird, uncontrolled swing. As I shuffled along like my 82-year-old father, I was totally unable to find a good stride. For some reason I was running bow-legged like I was ready to drop a baby out of my Mother Nature. My hips saddle bags felt like real saddle bags, weighed down with sand, locked and tight.
Before I could shuffle up the first hill, I was lapped about 18 times by a 78-year-old Japanese woman walking (WALKING!) who just laughed at me every time she passed.
I finally got to the top of the hill, but running down wasn’t really much better. My calves, used to wearing towering high heels, cramped up in protest. But the searing pain in my calves couldn’t compete with the stitch in my side that I got from not drinking enough water before I started. And it turns out that running downhill requires way more coordination and skill than I possess. I stumbled a few times, tripping over my own damn feet. I pictured myself tripping over myself, rolling ass over feet, straight down into traffic.
When I got back on flat ground I restrained myself from laying down on the sidewalk—mostly because I didn’t want any of my neighbors to see me—and walked the rest of the way home—about a half mile.
Instead of celebrating how fit and healthy I am, this run is doing the total opposite. I’ve bitched about turning 41 but until this week I’ve actually felt okay about it. For the most part I look pretty good—most of my parts are still roughly where they started out, and the wrinkles are pretty minimal—but doing this run has been a lesson in humility. And humiliation.
But I think I figured out a way to get through this run. Have you ever seen dog racing? They put a fake rabbit on the rail inside the track and the dogs chase it, right? I’m going to have Bill run ahead of me with a fan attached to the back of his head and a TV strapped to his back, preferably tuned into The Real Housewives of New Jersey. I figure instead of re-creating a real outside running experience, I’m going to re-create a comfortable gym experience.
He doesn’t know this yet, though.
Otherwise? I’m screwed.
Yeah, there’s really no good way to convince your body to run when it is pretty sure it is tired & leaden. Were you listening to music when you ran? Sometimes that helps to take your mind off of things. Or maybe you just need to adjust your pace? I know I tend to have a pace problem where I start out far too fast for a long distance sustainable pace and then I get way tired far earlier than I should.