Project 400

If someone asked me what kind of runner I am, I think I'd probably used the term "distance runner". I wouldn't be happy about it though. There's just something slow and unglamorous about the term distance runner. Like you couldn't make the cheerleading squad so you ended up on the flag team. Or the homecoming queen turned you down for the prom so you settled on the girl that smelled funny and drooled.

I totally dated the homecoming queen so I have no time for people thinking I can't move. In fact, in high school the 4x400 team tried to get me to come out to run the third leg. In college I ran a 48 second 400. And anyone who's seen me on the softball field knows that I can get around the bases. I have speed.

Or did I have speed?

Like so many things in life if you don't use it you lose it, and as the grains of time slip through the hour glass of life I become less and less fleet of feet. I just don't have the kind of turnover I did when I was young and spry.

But how slow am I?

I really had no idea until tonight, and it's kind of upsetting to find out the answer is pretty fricken slow. I was out at the track tonight calibrating my iPod and decided to run a 400 just to see. Kind of take a peak at just how good of shape I'm in. I figured I'd look at the watch and be totally psyched. It turned out to be a fitness FAIL.

Never mind that I pretty much collapsed after I finished, and forget the fact that I just felt slow and lumbering, and we won't even get into the fact that I nearly pulled off halfway through because I didn't even want to know, and I'm blocking out the fact that the one 400 is going to practically cripple me in the morning - but when I finally checked the time all I could do was a 65 second lap. That's redic. It's beyond redic, it's like totally WTF.

So I've decided that over the next month I want to shave 10 seconds off that. A 55 isn't exactly blazing, but it is respectable and obtainable. Much like myself. I'll let the no one who reads this know how that goes.