5k on the brain

deciding i needed to give my poor defenseless shins a rest, and wanting to break away from the monotony of starting my blogs with olie whining at 5 am, aj and i decided to take friday morning off. we thought it would be more beneficial to cross-train that evening and save our last two runs of the week for saturday and sunday.

cross-training has been both enjoyable and entertaining the past few days. to our amusement we have been inadvertently working out with this kid named andrew. my guess is that andrew is in the seventh grade, about 4'9" and sitting pretty at 85 pounds. to paint you an even more vivid picture he looks like he'd be the default kid casted as "boy number 2" in a diary of anne frank remake. i'm sure this poor kid gets made fun of enough at school, so i really do not plan on jumping on the bandwagon, but he is quite interesting to watch.

yesterday andrew came into the workout room with another pubescent and equally awkward kid. apparently andrew had been raving about the 60 pounds he could now curl and wanted to show off to said pal. you see, normally i am the person who roots for the underdog. normally i would take one look at andrew and applaud him for all of his efforts. you can tell that inside his tiny frame he is just dying to be like some of the boys at his school that are starting to fill-out and come into their manhood. poor andrew is far from filling anything out.. except maybe a scantron test in seventh grade social studies. i'm sure he'd excel at that.

but anyway, i am digressing from digression. i really have no moral of the story with andrew. he is fun to watch when he makes fish-faces while doing lateral pull-downs and i just thought he deserved a cameo in here somewhere. (i'm hoping he'll become a regular.)

today aj and i slept in. we woke up to the sun shinning in though our window and the wind crashing into the side of our building. i took olie outside to see that it was a beautiful and sunny 46˚ day with some frightening 37 mph gusting winds. we got all wrapped up to protect ourselves from the wind and set out for a 5k run. my shins where doing pretty good, even though there was some pain on impact here and there when i started. as i continued on, the pain got a little more intense and breathing became an issue as well.

over a year ago i was having a lot of chest pains and breathing problems. i went to the doctor and she told me that she did not want to declare me asthmatic, but that i did breath like someone with asthma. she put me on medication and the problem started to go away. feeling like i didn't want to be on medication forever i chose to stop inhaling steroids and the breathing problems never returned. i don't think that i have any kind of breathing problem and i know i don't have asthma. i think that my lungs just aren't as strong as they could be, and through all of this training i feel like they are getting stronger everyday. the natural way.

with that in mind while i was running, i knew i was not going to have an asthma attack or keel over from lack of oxygen into my lungs so i kept pushing. i realized early on that it is just more difficult to breath when the wind is smacking you in the face at over 30 miles per hour. i really tried to focus on a rhythm to my breathing and it seemed to help. in addition to the pain in my shins and the difficulty breathing, the mucus in my face was going nuts! i always try to throw a napkin or two in my hoodie pocket before a run and luckily today was one of the days i remembered it! every time i slowed down to catch my breath i blew my nose and spit out the incredibly thick funk in my mouth. nice imagery, i know, but it's what helped me keep going.

i altered my route today so that i did not have to run the cal de sac with the hill, and i tried to not run directly into the wind too much either. running into the wind is pretty much like trying to swim in chocolate pudding. it might feel a little refreshing, but you get nowhere.

as the man in my ipod starting counting down the kilometers i tried to not walk too much, despite the fact a kilometer means nothing to me. as i closed in on 800 meters left i got a sudden burst of energy. i had just passed aj a block back and i had really expected him to finish his 5k hours before me. i had to keep running. making a turn around a small cal de sac and into the wind, i knew my final stretch was going to be a struggle. i passed a kid on a bike who looked like he'd never seen a person run for fun before in his life, but luckily he knew some runner/biker sidewalk etiquette and gracefully peddled in the grass giving me ample room to pass. at that moment the man in my ipod congratulated me on completing my goal of running 5k and i abruptly cut him off by ending the workout. i generally leave my ipod on during my walking cool-down just to have the added milage, but this time i was very focused on short run time and a quick average pace.

i headed back to the apartment and saw aj still standing outside. i waved my arms at him from a distance and he started heading towards me. seeing that he was not huffing and puffing like i was i knew he had finished before me but the fact he was still outside made me feel great. maybe i had actually finished with a pretty good time. we walked over to the sauna and shared our experience with the 5k and our results. aj had finished in 31 minutes, cutting 40 seconds off of his last 5k! i, amazingly, only finished about 4 minutes behind aj at 35 minutes! i couldn't believe it.

while i didn't run the entire thing, i am very confident that i will be able to run the entire 5k we just signed up for on march 15!!! (yes, that was worthy of three exclamation points!) this will be our first official race and we are very excited! we are going to continue to run four times per week and cross-train as often as we can find time for. come race day we are going to be fit and ready!