I cannot tell you how much I hate, abhor, detest, passionately dislike it.
And yet despite of that, I´ve made it a habit of running every morning at 6 am for an hour. And today, I ran my first 5K race.
No, I didn´t win.
But I didn´t come in last either. I beat my personal record (from 60 minutes down to 53) and was able to finish without much trouble (excepting some minor burn in my legs).
Tonight, I signed up for the We Run Quito Nike 10K for October 29th.
Yeah, I´m slightly nuts.
The reason I run, even though I hate it, is because it gives me some discipline in working out and it is a means to an end. I need to be fit and I need to be lighter to get back into what I´m really passionate about - fencing. My trainers and coaches have made it very clear that if I don´t drop 30 pounds and improve my overall fitness, premature re-entry into fencing might result in some bad damage to my left ankle (which although completely healed by physical therapy, can still be, quite literally, my achilles´ heel). So after grumbling for a bit and cursing the alarm clock, I drag my butt out of bed and onto the road.
Other reasons to go running is the fact that (1) I can run anywhere, (2) I can´t afford a gym, and (3) apparently the neighborhood I live in is like runner´s heaven. The roads here are ideal for hard-core training. I can´t tackle the hill my house is on yet, but there is a smaller incline road off the main road that is a good starters circuit. Someday I´ll try the bigger hill. Someday when I go completely bonkers and decide to sign up for "La Ruta de las Iglesias" a notoriously hard but beautiful race that takes participants on around Quito´s old colonial center at night. This all sounds wonderful until one realizes that the colonial center is built around the steepest hills in the city. Cars regularly have trouble going up them. Imagine running up one of those things.
No thank you. I´ll stick to my flat races....
Anyhoo, the 5K I did today was one I signed up while I wasn´t quite there mentally (i.e. I was deluded by exhaustion). The conversation went something like this:
Dad: There´s a 5K on Saturday. Do you want to run?
Me: Uh-huh.
(falls asleep on couch)
The race itself was going through the Chaquiñán (Quechua for "road") which is basically this dirt road that follows what used to be the railway tracks. It starts in Cumbayá (the suburban town I inhabit) and ends up somewhere in Puembo (a place so far that it takes 40 minutes to get there by car). Insane nutty athletes run this whole path on a regular basis on the weekends. Me? I did a bicycle ride there once...when the school made me do it for Environmental Education. Like all excursions of the sort, it sucked.
(Tangent: The school often forgot that most of us were not insane nutty athletes and would organize dumb field trips like that under the excuse of getting us outside. "Let´s go hike up Ilaló!" was the more reasonable trip, but sometimes we´d get stuff like "Let´s go hike up Cotopaxi!", which, honestly, guys, there are PROFESSIONAL HIKERS who have trouble climbing up that damned glacial volcano. What makes you think that a gaggle of 80 prissy prep-school high schoolers are going to be able to accomplish that?)
Anyhoo, the Chaquiñán trail is pretty intense. It is dusty, pretty hilly (with a lot of ups and downs), and it is riddled by unstable footing. Some more experienced runners told me (later on) that it was a difficult trail to do, especially in the morning with the Equatorial sun beating down on you. So, all in all, considering that I didn´t stop once and that I got to the finish line, I feel very accomplished.
They tell me the Nike 10K is easier. Mostly flat. All inside the city (so on asphalt) and at night (no tiring Equatorial sun) so it should be ok. I still have to train though. I don´t think I´ve ever really done 10K in training. I usually just stop at 5, which capped off to about an hour. I guess that means more hours of training in the morning.
Ah well.
I think I can do it. :D
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