Survived, but just barely

Nice night for the Corporate Challenge, breezy and fairly cool and no sun whatsoever. There were way too many runners (around 3000), and squeezing all those people onto Madison Avenue meant that for a while I was running on the sidewalk and leaping over tulips. The race wasn’t well-supported with cheering throngs, which meant that mostly it was oddly quiet, with a lot of huffing and puffing and the beating of feet, but not much else. The highlight of the race was near the beginning, when a couple of old drunks stepped out of the Bottoms Up tavern, cigarettes and beer bottles in hand, and called out, “Y’all gonna kill yaselves!” Well, that may be true, but better I do it myself than pay Philip Morris (excuse me, Altria) to do it for me. Anyway, hit my first split half a minute behind my pace, which surprised me because I thought I was kicking ass. The distance between the first and second mile markers was, by my body’s count, 3 miles. I kept an even pace on the hills instead of backing off, and that worked for a while, but then I started to hit the Heave Fault Line, and I knew that if I pressed any harder, I would hurl. So I’d back off, feel okay, speed up, feel like hurling, back off, feel okay, rinse, repeat. If I had known for sure that hurling would have let me go faster, I’d have just crossed the line and gotten it over with, but I haven’t had this happen before, so I didn’t know. My second mile was just under 18 (17:50) and I thought if I could keep pace I’d at least end with a decent time, but I really had to back off in the last mile and a half and people started passing me. Bastids! So I ended up with 29:13, not the worst time in the world but nine minutes behind our leading racer. Still, a couple of more athletic types finished behind me, so I felt okay. Several times during the race I decided that this was my last race, that there was no reason on this earth that I had to run in races. When I was done, I was figuring out how to improve my time next time. Perhaps I should accept that my asthmatic lungs have limited capacity.

Mr. Johnson says, “Yeah, that’ll happen.