Athletic Training: The Weekly Long Run
It’s 6:00 a.m. when my alarm goes off. Time to get up and go to training. I look out the window. It’s still dark, and the frost on the grass paints a perfect picture with misty fog. I hang my head, put my gear on, and walk out the door.
I start jogging. It’s so cold that I feel if I go any faster, all the muscles in my body will snap. It’s silent. There’s no sound. No cars, no music, no talking. It’s just me, the wind, and the open lonely road. I trudge on and look at my watch and see that I’ve only gone two minutes. I throw my head back, 58 minutes to go.
The most mortal sin of all as a runner is to be constantly looking at your watch. Time doesn’t go any faster if you stare wide-eyed at it. Although some seasoned runners may argue this point, it has yet to be proven.
In the early hours of the day, running is not a raging social experience, so you can become bored easily, even worse if you leave from the same place every morning (and my teachers wonder why I’m disruptive in class).
As I plod along, I wish that I could wake up in a different place every morning so that I wouldn’t get bored for at least the first 15 minutes. Or even better, as I sleep, mysterious elves take my bed and transport me to different exotic places where women roam around in bikinis all day long.
I must have dozed off as a red 4WD, with headlights flashing, beeped at me to get off the middle of the road. “Okay, concentrate,” I say to myself. I look at my watch. It reads 10 minutes. I throw my head back, 50 minutes to go.
Now that I’m fully awake, for some unknown reason, I always remember the last thing I heard. In my case, it was my radio waking me up. Just as if you were in the shower, the last song you heard stays in your head, except I’m only in the shower for 10 minutes. I have 50 minutes to go, so it’s a real problem when I have a song like “Barbie Girl” stuck in my head.
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