For a little while there, I was fairly certain that God just didn’t care for my presence in this world and was attempting to cause my death. Strike me down, Sith-style, if you smell what The Hearn is braising. In an effort to limit my girth, which has once again neared Rosie O’Donnell proportions, I have taken up running. Sadly, the good Lord appears to want me to be overweight, because as it turns out, running hurts. A lot a lot.
I was even going slow! We have a track around the buildings at work that I measured (with my bike, which has an odometer computer thingy) to be .55 miles (designed by Etruscans, or something, I think), and I was doing laps at a pace of nearly 7 minutes per lap. For those of you adding at home, this means I was running a mile every 12 minutes, 44 seconds, which isn’t enough to outrun a Swiss glacier. And I actually managed to run 5 solid laps, a distance of nearly three miles.
I’m told that after a short distance, your body wakes up to the fact that you are causing it INTENSE BLOODY PAIN and begins to flood itself with endorphins, which amount to naturally secreted heroin. For me, this was never happening. I began to think that God, in His wisdom, had simply not granted me the ability to create endorphins. I nearly gave up.
Then I had a brainstorm. Well, two, actually. The first was, “Screw this, let’s just see if we can get over 300 pounds and get on disability.” The second was, “Hmmm…perhaps I’m simply not causing my body ENOUGH pain to start the endorphin rush!” The next day, I laced up my venerable New Balance cross-trainers, stretched a bit, and took off. I wasn’t running flat-out, but roughly 85% of my maximum effort. By about halfway around the track, I was sure I was going to die, but I didn’t let up, and lo and behold, just a few hundred yards later, I had the unmistakable feeling of calm and lightness that comes only from high-grade opiates. It was delicious! It was delightful! It was probably Gordo sticking a dirty needle in my arm. Still.
I ran a bunch more laps, setting a personal record time for 3 miles, and went inside to shower. It was hours later before I figured out the downside of running without pain: the pain just hits full-force when the endorphins wear off, usually by dinner. And I was crippled. Oh, was I crippled.
Which is why it was probably foolish for me to have done it again the following day.
