Two Miles of Hell
Have you seen those new commercials for ‘New Balance’ shoes? The ad talks about the LOVE/HATE relationship people have with running. I tend to lean more towards the hate side of things… but for some odd reason it jumped into my head last night that I should go take a run. AND IT WAS HELL!
Within the first 3 blocks my knees started to ache… it felt like two small grapes were lodged behind my knee caps and they were mad! So they acted like watermelons.
After the first 1/2 mile I was leaking sweat from every part of my body. Nothing stings like the salty pain of sweat in your eye.
As I completed the mile number one… my body loosened up a little and finally came to this realization: We still had to run a mile more to get home! Not pleased with this new bit of information, that’s when the super heavy breathing kicked in urging me to stop and walk.
Since I wasn’t about to let a little fire in my lungs to slow be down, I just opened my mouth a little wider and tried to suck in more O2… and apparently a lightning bug too. Let me tell you this… at night, those things are hard to see when their butts aren’t all a glow. Oh, and they taste awful. Thankfully I was able to spit it out.
“That F-ing Hill,” as I like to call it, comes into play at about 1 1/2 miles into my run and true to form as I am gasping a sluggishly working my way up the hill in a half trot / half gimpy run manner, my back shoots me a pain. Nothing like your lower-back stepping up to say. “Are we done yet?”
Cresting the top of “The F-ing Hill” I can take solace in knowing that it’s all down hill from here, literally. And as I, the benevolent runner, come to a gasping halt in my driveway, my calves are quivering, my thighs are throbbing, and I’m panting like at sheep dog on a hot day. Its at this moment that my brain pipes up with the most absurd statement a brain could make… We should do that again tomorrow.
- Tommy