Story Time

Before I became the road running monster that I am today, there was a time when I didn't exercise much. I know it's hard to believe there was a day when I wasn't mercilessly pounding the pavement, but I had more important things to attend to at the time (I'm sure anyone who reads this blog can guess).

Prior to getting married, I was still in the mode where we actually try to impress our partner, called dating.  My wife was going to run the half-marathon in Nashville and I said to myself...I used to be in shape, how hard can a half marathon possibly be?....so I said, "Sure I'll do it, I'm an idiot" (paraphrasing).  Now, there was still a few months till the race, so I had time to prepare and I swear I had every intention of doing so, but instead I chose to continue to attend to the aforementioned important things and maintained the status quo. I did knock out one solid training run a couple days prior to the race, that was maybe 2 miles.

We get to Nashville the day before the race, head to the Expo and get our race packets, which was an insane madhouse and then hung out with Mel's family, had a nice Spaghetti dinner, etc. etc.  After everyone else settled in, my future wife and I decided we would just go out for a quick beverage and then come back and go to bed.  As I'm sure many of you can relate to, this simple beverage magically multiplied exponentially and we found ourselves back at the hotel around 2:45AM, with a wake-up call at around 5:30.  Solid preparation.

Woke up a few hours later and I was still "feeling the effects" of our late night shenanigans, so I was still happy and felt decent heading into the trip to the race.  This feeling crashed and burned as we jogged to the race start and I knew we were in serious trouble.

I threw up by the sidewalk prior to the race start and people looked at me like I was crazy, but I'm sure they just thought it was nerves.  We found our place in the corral and I just started laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation.  When that gun went off I had no idea what I was in for, but I knew I was going to try and approach it as slowly as possible.

Everything started reasonably well, the first couple miles went extremely slowly, but I completed them without too much trouble....then I fell off the proverbial cliff.  I was an absolute mess...my body began shutting down mile by mile.  First it was the side cramps, then the hamstrings, then my calves tightened up like baseballs.  I was eating jelly beans and drinking water, but it was no use.  When we reached mile twelve my wife's father tried to coax me into running again so that we could finish before they shut the race down probably...I slowly started my weird hunchback of Notre Dame herky-jerk run style and shambled my way closer to the finish.

The crowd was roaring as I neared the finish and I spotted my nemesis...an at least 85 year old woman who was ahead of me. I picked up my shamble to a trot despite basically having Lieutenant Dan legs at that point in my last ditch effort to best the near-centenarian.  There is actually photo evidence (I'll see if i can find it and post it) of me doing a sprinters lean across the finish line and still losing to this fossil by a half step.  Adding insult to injury, I injured my side doing when I threw my arms back in the sprinters lean.

Final Time: 3 hours and 59 minutes. Blazing.

Moral of this ridiculously long post:  If you are going to do a race, even if you don't compete, train.  If you are going to do an endurance competition, save the celebration until afterwards, or be prepared for a soul crushing period of time that takes at least twice as long as it should.