Chapter Eight - In Which Our Heroine Devises a Plan

First of all, anyone who said childbirth is the most painful experience there is must never have had shin splints. Now, I've never actually experienced the messy, wet, and scream-inducing process of bringing forth life from my loins BUT I have had shin splints. And after a liberal application of Icy-Hot, living with shin splints for a week is a messy, wet, and scream-inducing process that rivals any other.

I'm just sayin'.

On a completely different note, my four-and-a-half mile run scheduled for today was the epitome of an epiphany. See, up until now, running a mile at a leisurely pace took me about 15 minutes. Today, I discovered that if I walk quickly for ten minutes, then start running at a pace of four miles an hour, I can walk half a mile and run the other half at steadily increasing speeds in the same amount of time as running the whole mile takes. Now for most people, this wouldn't matter much. Most runners wouldn't understand the point of this when I could just as easily run the whole mile slowly in fifteen minutes.

But for someone like me, with legs so long it seems as if they were made for running reeeeeally fast for very short distances (or made to kick someone in the head from three feet away as my good friend, the late Anthony Nguyen said about his hope for my future career as a famous female kickboxer), distance running is tedious and also painful, as the strides are shorter yet seem to take more time. Being able to increase my speed in increments to a point that I feel comfortable with makes the running less... impossible.

I'm positive I would have made it through the whole four and a half damn miles, too, but I forgot my inhaler in the car, and I had some trouble breathing.

That, and the battery ran out on my mp3 player. I hate running in silence.

Chapter Seven - In Which Our Heroine is Told to Quit

As a runner-in-training with asthma, I've been worried a lot lately because I can't seem to get through most of my workouts anymore. I was under the incorrect impressions that not only is my asthma not as bad as it obviously is, but that my "not so bad" asthma would ease up with the increased lung capacity I thought I would gain while training.

But, I was wrong. My asthma is actually much worse than I originally believed it was, and I'm currently in the process of trying to find a doctor in Miami who will diagnose and treat my lung problems. I thought that I only had asthma when I had an asthma attack, but, just like the commercial says: I still have asthma, even though I don't always show symptoms.

To make matters worse, because I didn't realize how serious my breathing problems were, I didn't realize how slim the chances of my lung capacity increasing were, too. Everything combined, along with thinking that now that I was a runner I could eat whatever I wanted (which wasn't necessarily BAD food, just not the kind of food that fuels you for a long workout), has conspired against me. I have spent the majority of this week thinking I should quit.

And then I was told I should quit. I liken the following phenomenon to the notion that I can say whatever I want about my mama, but you better be damn sure you don't talk smack about her. Following this way of thinking, I can wonder whether or not I should quit... I can even seriously contemplate just giving up... but the minute someone told me that I should quit; that I couldn't do it anymore; that I wasn't healthy enough to do it anymore... I said, "Fuck that."

So I'm not quitting. Yes, there are concessions I'm going to have to make. I'm going to have to drastically change my diet (yes, again, I thought changing it at the beginning of my damn training was bad enough!) in order to energize myself as much as possible (goodbye work-provided chai lattes, hello water bottle, dammit). I'm going to have to do the majority of my training in the gym, at least until it gets a lot less humid outside (in Miami? Yeah, right). I'm going to have to stop drinking COMPLETELY (well, maybe not completely... ok, ok, fine... wait, how about just one night a week?). But it will all be worth it if I can at least prove to myself that I can continue doing it, even if it means not actually running the race.

Time will tell whether or not the race gets run... but the journey will continue.