My calves are screaming. I kept waiting for someone on the street to notice their little voices as I walked my usual fifteen minutes from the car to the office this morning. I increased my intervals on Wednesday. I ran for five minutes and walked for one minute. It doesn't sound like much does it? Five minutes of jogging doesn't sound like a lot. It's less than two songs on Itunes. It's shorter than the coffee line at Foster's in the morning.
Guess what?
It's a really long time when I'm running. I had no idea that running would allow me to escape the laws of time and space. For example, I am sure that time stood still on Wednesday. I was halfway down Franklin and had been jogging for at least three minutes when time stopped. I know this because there is no way that it was only two more minutes until the whistle blew. In that time, I travelled two blocks, waited for a traffic light, counted the number of steps I took (a million, I'm sure of it), noticed that my feet hurt, noticed that my glasses were sliding down my nose, counted some steps (half a million, I swear), wondered how bad it would look if I tackled the pizza delivery car and ate every slice in the warming bag, took off my jacket, and counted steps ( ok, maybe only 250,000). Two minutes? I don't think so.
In fact, this was the longest steady interval I'd ever run. During my last NOBO, we moved from road to trail near the end of the program to prepare us for the race. Since we were running in the woods, we abandoned intervals in favor of running in packs so we didn't get lost. OK – I nearly got a little lost. But, it meant that the last time I was timing my intervals, I was running four and walking one. Wednesday night, I ran five and ones for two and quarter miles.
The second amazing proof that time stops when I run? It has to speed up when I walk to keep everything in balance. I realized that time was speeding up because I couldn't complete two sentences in the space of one walking break. Now, others may attribute that to the fact that panting and talking are often incompatible, but I know the truth. Time moves faster so that when I've finished running, everything is back the way it was before I stepped out of the parking lot.
It's actually kind of amazing to see how time bends around running. In the space of an hour, I'm able to reset my mood, justify my new shoes, reclaim some connection to my youth and make lots of people feel really good about themselves as they watch me stumble by. And the next day, when my calves are screaming? I think about my power over time and space and I smile.
No comments:
Post a Comment