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.