Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Run, Dr. Beth, Run

June 7, 2012 by Beth

When I started my MBA, I decided that there were certain things that I would have to give up in order to make time for school. One of those things that I said I was going to sacrifice was training for half marathons. As it turns out, I’m a filthy, filthy liar!

The thing is, at first I did give up on my running ways. Which resulted in my gaining 10+ lbs and feeling like a big pile of crappity crap. And then, a few weeks ago while out on one of the few runs I’d allowed myself to go on this year, I remembered how good it felt to run. How much my body loves to move. How refreshed my brain feels after working out my body. And I came to the realization that I just can’t afford to keep putting off my health. I mean, I have two years left in this program ((Oh dear god, 2 years???)) – can I really just say, “I’ll worry about being healthy two years from now!”? I’m too old for that.

Now, I know that there are only so many hours in the day. But I ca,e to the recognition that I’d truly rather be fit-and-B-student than fat-and-an-A-student ((To be more accurate, I’m only speaking of my own individual marks when it comes to this. For group work, I understand that other people are more concerned with marks, so group work always comes first and I’m always willing to go the extra mile for group work, at the expense of my individual work. And, so far, I’m firmly in the A range for both group and individual work despite having spent some time on being active, so I think this is something that I can manage.)). I’m learning a hellava lot in school and they give us a hellava lot to do, but with a little bit of organization, I can get what I need to get done  – remembering that I don’t have to have the top mark in the class – and still make time for running. I *have* to make time for running. Plus, my brain works a lot more efficiently when I’m exercising regularly, so if I can fit in an hour of running after work and then do my homework after that in a much more focused way, I’m golden.

A short while later, while out on another run, I came to another important realization ((See. I told you running makes me think better!)). The Victoria Half Marathon is in the beginning of October, which means the lion’s share of the training for it occurs during the summer. As in when I don’t have classes ((I do have a big group project to work on, but I’ll have much more flexibility over my schedule than when I have classes every third weekend.)). And I know from past experience that if I don’t have a race that I’m training for, I just don’t get out running. So I came home from that run an announced to Devon, “We should run the Victoria Half Marathon!” To which he immediately agreed ((See. I told you Devon is made of awesome!)).

And that’s how this happened:

Well, actually, that’s an oversimplification. I went online to register for the race, but I got hung up for a while on the question “What would you like mentioned about you when you cross the finish line?” You see, when you run in these races, you have a timing chip on your shoe that records your race time. But it also means that the race announcers see a list of people’s names as they cross the finish line. So it appears that they are giving you the option to write in a little something so that instead of just announcing your name and city, they can add some excitement to the announcing by saying a little something about you. Of course, there’s so many people running the race that they won’t be able to say everyone’s name, so I figured I wanted to put something catchy in the hopes that the announcer actually says mine. But what to say?

Of course, I asked some friends, and Dr. Dan came up with:

Because how hilarious would it be for the announcer to yell out to all the runners that the undead are hot on their heels?

Then I thought maybe this one would be funny:

But I figured that there would be 0% chance that they announcers would go for that. So I finally settled on an eternal truth after all races:

And while we are on the topic of running, did you know that yesterday was National Running Day (NRD)? Naturally, I celebrated by going for a run ((After my teleconference with my project group from school and before coming home and reading about Business Ethics. See, I told you I could do all the things!)). Happily, the running gods decided to bless us on NRD with the only day of not-raining we are going to get this week. But they also made it threaten to rain, with a few sprinkles here and there, to motivate me to run faster in hopes of avoiding the potential-rain. The running gods are nice like that. In the end, when I got home from my run, I checked my trusty Runkeeper App, which I use to track all my runs, and found that I had, in fact, run a better pace than I had been of late, and also that I’d run an awesome distance of awesomeness:

6.66 km! Tee hee ((Don’t look at the “current pace”. It’s slow because it takes a minute for me to take my iPhone out of my arm band, unlock the screen, and stop the timer))!

Anyhoo, all that to say that I’m back on the running bandwagon – though I don’t expect to be running as much as I did in the carefree days when I wasn’t a student. But I will at least do all the long runs in my training program and at least another run or two per week. Training officially starts on Sunday! Squee!

Comments |2|

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.