Roads That Remind Me of Home

Today Meesh, Kal, and I ran 6.15 miles. It was incredible. I don't know how to describe what I was feeling. All the time I hear people say they can't even run a mile. That is the biggest bologna I have ever heard. The reason people think they can't run is because they haven't tried to run more than a mile or two at a time. Personally I think the hardest part of running is the first two miles. Sometimes even the first three. After you push past that point you sort of transform. It's as if your mind is running alongside your body rather than remainging inside of your head, and it's pushing you to keep going.

I told Meesh that the first couple miles are the hardest and after that it gets easier, because we started out with almost an entire mile of only uphill road. As I listened to her breathing I realized that she was gasping for air. All of us were breathing pretty hard because of the hill, but hers was loud and it worried me a bit, because everyone has bad days of running and I didn't want her to keel over. Like I promised, after a couple miles her breathing evened out and we all pressed on. I was able to talk her through a little bit of the struggle. I told her to breath from deep in her belly rather than from her chest. I directed her on when we were going to pick up pace and when we were getting close to a downhill or the finish.

I'm not sure any of it helped, but it made me feel good. It brought back memories of running cross country as a team. We had those few people that ran almost our same pace. When one of us was having a bad day we would push them to keep up with us. We had a signal we used when they started drifting behind. It was as simple as bringing your hand behind your back and wiggling your fingers. It was our way of saying, "Hey you! Come up here and run beside me. Don't fall behind. You can do it." Sometimes it's hard to say all that when you are short of breath.

There were a few highlights of this run. First of all, when we were running along the side of the road Kal came up behind me and nudged my shoulder. "Slugbug!" I turned around to look for it. "Where? I don't see it--" I looked around just in time to see that I was about to step on a good-sized bird that was squished on the side of the road. I saw it just in time to jump over it. Anyone who knows me knows how much I am in love with my running shoes and would not appreciate dead bird gutts on them.

Another funny thing was during the last mile of the run. I kept wanting to pick up the pace, but the sun had just gone down and everything was freezing over. We had to keep on our toes because of all the black ice on the sidewalks. I came close to falling a couple times when I felt the ground slipping under me, but luckily none of us fell. Meesh was throwing mini-tantrums about the ice. At one point I heard her shriek behind me. My heart leapt and I whipped around thinking she had fallen only to discover that she was just yelling at the ice. I have to admit it was pretty funny hearing her fuss over it. She is a trooper, running with us through this weather. Hopefully it isn't this icey every day. I don't look forward to the day we have to do our long runs on the indoor track. It takes five and a half laps to run one mile. Running eight miles on the indoor track is 44 laps. I think I threw up a little just imagining it.