FIRST HALF MARATHON

Yeah unfortunately, that red streak on my shirt is nipple blood. I applied the band-aids and everything, and still left my nips rolling around in the street somewhere between miles 8 and 12.  My $14 Target swimming trunks garnered more cheers than I expected. Seriously, about 8-10 ladies said “love your shorts!”, and it wasn’t even when my bulbous ass was working hard to grind up a hill. Hahaha. Kidding.

I need to get melodramatic here about the running thing. The truth is that it has been a big deal for me in terms of proving to myself that I can actually finish something. In May 2006, I couldn’t run more than a block or 2 without thoughts of vomiting, or stopping. The last few weeks have been challenging to squeeze in the volume of running I needed to train properly, and I was definitely nervous on Friday. The farthest I was able to run in training was 9 miles (last Sunday in Chicago), and I needed to run 13 on Saturday.  Once we walked up to starting gates and felt the electricity in the air, I knew it was going to be a special morning. Suddenly I really appreciated the overcast, shitty Akron weather. It was just a cool, even run the whole way through. I wasn’t looking ahead to the next mile, I was just enjoying seeing all the spectators and the scenery. Akron was gorgeous that morning, and what better way to see it?

There were too many great little moments in that hour and 53 minutes to share here, but I will leave you with this: The overwhelmingly GOOD thought I kept thinking over and over was that we need to do more things for ourselves that no one can ever take from us. No one can take these 13 miles away from you. Once you’ve done it, the experience is yours forever. That was my only goal, to finish something. Anything. Actually kicking my goal’s ass left me with some bigger, grandiose ideas of a marathon, and of course finishing a lot of other shit I’ve been talking about for a while. Just the idea of something is plenty to get excited about, but for at least this weekend, I was proud that I actually put all that time in. I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t love doing it.

To summarize, in May 2006 I decided to stop telling myself that I’ll never do anything athletic, that I couldn’t run. What are we still telling ourselves that we can’t do every day? There’s probably a lot. Jason Woods is looking into Triathalons, so I told him I was going to turn my attention to cage fighting. We both agreed I have the build for it, and I can only assume that removing my nips through friction will prove to be an advantage.