Friday, August 15, 2008

Week Seventeen: Wednesday

Wednesday was a seven miler. I was trying to come up with excuses not to run, but in the end my poor performance on Monday made me realize that it was necessary. I took off at 8:30, which turned out to be the best/worst idea I have ever had.

It had rained and was still very overcast when I started, so it got very dark very quickly. My original plan was to run in the park only and avoid running along the road because it was dark and I was wearing a black shirt. Maybe the navy blue pants would have been bright enough to alert a car. Somehow I doubt it.

Well, when I got to the park it was a ghost town. There was one pickup truck that left as soon as I ran by it. I thought they were going to either kill or mock me. I lucked out and they did neither.

Then I had to run through the woods. A little background; I am pretty sure that a bunch of years ago they found a headless woman dumped in there, and I remember at least one other dude who died back in there. Plus there have been a roving band of teenagers beating people with baseball bats in St. Paul. All of this made me super paranoid and convinced that I was finally going to get serial killed.

This is important because at this point I was at the two mile mark and not only was I not going to walk, I was running pretty fast. I wanted to get the hell out of there. I also decided that I would rather get hit by a car than batted or stabbed so I took the route along the road the rest of the way. Since I am writing this, you can guess that I made it out alive….or did I? The only other moment that was touchy was when my super Ipod mix brought up “Wild Boys” by Duran Duran and the lyric: “There’s Murder (rder,rder,rder) by the roadside” came up and I thought I was going to get killed on Long Lake Road.

In the end, I ran the entire seven miles. I was extremely pleased with myself. It took me 1 hour 14 minutes. Somewhere between a 10 and 11 minute mile. I really tried to pace myself better and it paid off.

Here’s the payoff for the above rambling. Weight time! When we last left our hero, he hadn’t run for two weeks and weighed in at 224 lbs.

211 lbs. Ladies and Gents. That is 13 lbs for the math challenged. That is a lot of weight, but the most important thing is that it sends me into a whole new world; the world of Overweightness. At 181-214 lbs and under I am obese, and can now classify myself as simply overweight. This means that when the local news does their weekly story on how fat Americans are, they will have to subtract one from the statistics and when they roll the stock footage of large people from the neck down, guts hanging out of shirts and large backsides, if they show me I will sue their asses.

Granted, I still have a ways to go. I am concerned some of this is because of that diet that I quit the next 30 isn’t going to come off so quickly. I am really going to keep at the eating healthy, but this running makes you hungry.

No comments: