30 November 2009

Running sucks

The family and I went up to the mountains for Thanksgiving weekend. It was an incredible time, good food, good family, crappy weather, and no pool. Umm, yeah, about that last part. I swam Wednesday morning before we left, got a good workout in, saw a different set of people at 8:30 than I usually do at 7:00, and then hopped in the car and drove. I realized I’d be three days off without swimming, nothing I couldn’t get used to.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, my wife informs me that because she’s scared of mountain lions, bears and cave-dwelling-meth-addicts-in-the-country, I was to go running with her. No big deal, I’ve run before and she assured me that I could keep up. It was all so simple, run for 20 minutes one way, do a little u-turn and run for 20 minutes back. Of course, the oxygen was the good kind, known as 3500 feet above sea level ferchrissakes. But it turned out that swimming has me in better shape than I thought. My legs were giving out before my lungs were; which was somewhat expected.

The big surprise happened on Thursday morning. As I struggled to pour coffee, she threw my shoes at me and said, “we’re off again.” Umm yeah, again? My legs still hurt. But, with images of bears and lions and meth addicts attacking her, we went running. {a quick aside, I was not there to protect her; rather, she can run faster so I was kind of the sacrificial buffer}. Other than a gaggle of turkeys that ironically almost ran us over (this was Thanksgiving morning), it was a pretty safe run.

Except for my shoes. It turns out that I have these fancy cool puma shoes that look like running shoes but really aren’t. And by the end of the run, my feet were pointing this out to me. I don’t think I broke any bones but a few of them must have bent in ways that they weren’t supposed to because I limped around for the next two days, using a combination of nasty weather and possible surgery as my excuses to not go again. Possibly, ever again.

When we got back to Oakland, I grabbed my swim bag, hopped in the car and headed for the blissful non-bone-threatening pool to start up on some real exercise again. As soon as I finished my last lap, I went into the locker room, grabbed my "running" shoes and tossed them in the garbage.

2 comments:

  1. Back when I was riding a bike more, I could ride for hours, but couldn't run for more than about two minutes.

    I think when we emerged from the sea as slimy, finned creatures, we first rode bicycles for a few hundred thousand years, and then, only reluctantly, moved on to walking around. In our natural state, we would probably run only if some big, hairy mastodon were chasing us.

    ReplyDelete
  2. O Docker, we'll just call your theory Darschwinnism. Yep, I just made that up.

    ReplyDelete