Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Taking the First Step

I'm reading this book and this part really made me laugh so I thought I'd share it with you. I'm sure some of you can identify, or have even been in the same place on the kitchen floor. I know I have. Hope you get a little laugh out of it too!
..:: an excerpt from The Non Runners Marathon Guide for Women::..
JOURNAL ENTRY: Week 2
The First Three Miles

Two weeks into my training, I ran into someone from my training team. This overly enthusiastic woman overly enthusiastically asked me if she'd see me at the 7am team run on Saturday. In my moderately enthusiastic way, I said, "Sure, I'll see you out there."

Riiiiiiight. You see, I don't like mornings, especially weekend mornings. And to be honest, they don't like me too much either. So when I heard that the team runs were going to be taking place at 7am on a Saturday, I was less than thrilled. But if that was what it was going to take, well then, by golly, that's what I was gonna do. But the odds of me actually getting out of bed at 7am on a Saturday are about as good as the odds I'll ever use the phrase "by golly" again in my life. So , needless to say, when 7am rolled around on Saturday, I had a slight change of heart. I like to think of it as a change of logic really. It went something like this: I hate mornings and I hate running. So why on earth would I feel the need to combine the two for what will surely be an unhappy union? Why not wait until a more suitable hour, like say, noon, to do the horrible moving of my body?

So that's what I did. I slept until a more humane time and then I got up and ran the required three miles on my own. You think I"m lying don't you? I'm not. I really did run three miles. Was it fun? No. Was it fullfilling? No. But most important, was it 7am? Thank the lord, no.
Before I went for my inaugural run, I decided to measure it with my car. I mapped out a route that equaled three miles on my speedometer - leaving from my house and ending at my house - a circle of sorts through downtown. Then I parked my car and ran that route. A couple things went wrong with this plan. First, I live downtown, so the entire three miles was along roads with lots of cars. When running your first major mileage, I do not recommend having car fumes nearby. Because you're going to be gasping for breath. And sucking in car fumes in not nearly as much fun as you'd imagine.

Second, it wasn't morning time any more. And as much as I disagree with the basic principles of morning, I must hand it to the am hours - they are nice and cool. The pm hours, not so cool. Of course, before today I'd never really noticed that they weren't cool, because before today I'd never really had occasion to force my heart rate up to that of a sprinting racehorse on speed. That tends to warm things up a bit. As I was running along a busy downtown street, with the sun beating down on me, I slowly started to see why people choose to run in tree-lined parks before the sun has the opportunity to rise directly overhead. Hmphh. By the time I got home I feared that death was iminent. Never in my life has my heart beat so fast. And with every beat a new spurt of sweat seemed to jump off my face. Which seemed weird, 'cause my face was so hot I would've thought that all the sweat would have evaporated on contact. But it didn't It continued to flow, as if from some unlimited sweat reserve that hasn't been tapped since that one time when I was ten and decided that a push-pop was worth chasing the ice cream man for two blocks.
I didn't think it was possible, but I actually got hotter once I stopped running. It seemed every ounce of my blood had rushed to my face and was screaming with every pulse, Let me out. Let me out. So hot in here. Boiling up. The second I got home I went straight to my kitchen and laid facedown on the floor. My face needed to be next to something cool, and I needed to no longer be vertical, so the tile in the kitchen seemed like a great way to bring all my needs together. If felt like hours that I lay there, my body bouncing with every heartbeat, trying so hard to right the many, many wrongs that were going on. I tried to figure out how to drink water while facedown on the floor, I ended up nearly drowning myself by pouring water near my mouth and trying to suck it in before it fell to the tile. When I realized that a marathon is twenty-three more miles than I just ran, I tried to end my misery by pouring the whole bottle of water on my face.

As you can see, the training is going really well so far.


From: The Non Runner's Marathon Guide for Women Get off your butt and on with your training By. Dawn Dais

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