GranolaBox

My New Year’s fitness resolution comes shortly after New Year’s now that I live in Naples. It does for many other people too. This is the time of year when people start training for the Saint J’s 5k. St. J’s is the funkiest looking Catholic Church on the planet.

Around this time people start training for the race. I did too once. It was around 9 degrees this morning, and as I decided to drive instead of walk to get bagels I was plunged into a short fit of guilt as the group of die hard runners came puffing down the street. Sometimes when I see people running, even in the dead of winter, it makes me want to start running again.

But these people were serious. The ones in the back looked as though they might have been having fun, but the ones in front were serious. The woman in the very front had a serious game face on.

I know what would happen though. It happens every time I even think about running, or actually do it. I’ll run for a couple days on fresh legs, and it’s fun. Then any longer than that it becomes a challenge. Then it becomes a chore.

Running, especially in preparation for 5k races, reminds me of my teenage athletic ineptitude all over again. When I was in tenth grade I decided for some bizarre reason to join the cross-country team. I think it was to get into honor society, or my crush on Joyce Ferber. Not sure.

The first few practices were hell. I’d probably never run more than a mile at one time in my life, and here I was running 8-10 miles a day. I got into a groove though, and when we ran in a fun run for one of our practices, I thought I could show the world what a six foot tall one hundred thirty five pound boy could do with a little moxie.

The race was on. I huffed and I puffed. I sped past the race-walkers, really old people, and even Joyce Ferber’s pregnant mom. It was glorious until the first hill and all the spark came out of my legs. Around mile two, Joyce’s mom (okay, she wasn’t just pregnant… she was REALLY pregnant) came cruising past me and I was too exhausted to reclaim my lead over her.

That was the beginning of the rest of my running career. When the season began in earnest, I soon became the third worst runner in the Northern Athletic conference. I arrived at that conclusion at the end of the season when I noticed that I DIDN’T come in last two times, and I beat two different kids each time.

So maybe once this cold snap ends I’ll start training for a week, and maybe actually stay with it for long enough to actually run the race in April. Then I think about the steep hill at the beginning of the race, the steeper hill in the middle, and what we all call Mt. Misery hill at the end.

Filed under: General Observations, Yesterdaze on January 24th, 2009