Get up, get up!

I suppose, since this is a first post, I should give some background or something, but those kinds of posts are really boring and are sort of  useless if there aren’t any readers. I probably can’t just launch straight into story-telling mode without SOME background, so the basic rundown is:

1. I’m a 22-year-old girl (the term woman still doesn’t feel quite right)
2. I’m a recent (read: within the past month) NYU graduate
3. I joined the NYU Triathlon Team in October 2009
4. My first triathlon is in 4 weeks (sprint distance)
5. I’m living at home in PA with my parents until some wonderful soul hires me and gets me out of this boring town
6. I’m not exactly the best athlete in the world.

It’s not that I don’t try to be athletic. I did mixed martial arts growing up and loved it. It’s just that when I hit college and stopped working out, my body was all, “Boy, this relaxing thing is nice!” and now it’s accustomed to sitting around and doing nothing. I’m working on it, bit by bit, but it certainly is a long and interesting journey.

Now that the boring stuff is over….

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Back in November, when I was barely a month into the tri team training, I came home for Thanksgiving Break determined to run. The holiday meant we would miss our Friday swim, and the coach wanted us to get out and keep moving. I didn’t have a pool available, but I could certainly go for a run. I hadn’t heard of any Turkey Trots around here, so I decided just to go around the neighborhood.

I knew of the website walkjogrun.net, and I wanted to determine how far around my neighborhood was. There are two ways around:

1) Follow the main road all the way–the short route.
2) Follow the main road to a split, take the extra loop around the back to hit a hill, and continue back on the main road–the long route.

I measured one of the routes, found that it came out to .98 miles. I didn’t write down which route it was since I thought it would be easy to remember. I ran two loops on Thanksgiving Day. It was fun, and I was proud since I couldn’t even run ONE mile just a month before. Over winter and spring breaks, I ran again. I couldn’t remember which route was the mile-long distance, but I was confident it was the longer one.

Cut to yesterday, June 3rd. I had just decided that after my triathlon was over, I would train for a half-marathon. I’ve done a 10k race and a 5-mile race, and I’m starting to get the racing bug. I looked up a training plan, and I decided to do one of the runs it suggested:  easy run, 2 miles, 11:47 pace. My 10k was at a 9:50, and my 5-miler was at 9:41, but hey, if the computer planner wanted me to run at 11:47, I was totally cool with it. Am I lazy? Yes. Do I care? Only sometimes.

I set out for my run. My pace felt really fast for a while, and I thought, “Wow, I bet I’ll have my fastest mile yet!” At the split, I continued on the long route. When I hit the hill in the back of the neighborhood, I checked my watch.

8:47.

“That can’t be right,” I thought to myself. “I must have slowed down a lot. I bet it’s this hill. I should go harder.”

So I did, making my feet move faster and trying to relax my forever-tense upper body. I got back on the main road and felt confident, knowing I only had a bit more to go before the mile mark. I checked my watch.

11:40.

“What?!” I was mad. Was I really that slow? Maybe races made me go faster because there were other people to push me. Maybe I was so horribly lazy that I couldn’t even motivate myself to run an 11:47 mile on my own.

When I hit the starting point, I turned around and headed back the opposite way. Maybe if I went down the hill instead of up I could still make it in time. Maybe the hill was really steep. Yeah, that was it. I motored back to the hill and let myself fly down it, hearing the coach’s voice in my head: “Don’t let up on the downhills. You’ll pass a lot of people that way!” By the time I made it back to the front of the neighborhood, I knew I must be well above my goal. I looked at my watch.

I had 4 minutes to make it in time. I pushed, and I pushed… and I failed.

I was so disheartened when I got back to the house. I sat on the floor stretching, petting my dog. At least he didn’t care if I was fast or not. He just liked that my shirt was smelly. That’s love, that is. As I was scratching his ears, I glared at my mug of watered-down Gatorade and wondered what I was possibly doing wrong. I thought back to a conversation I had with my sister two weeks before. She was training for her first 5k, and we went running together.

“You have to do the hill in the back and run the long way around to make it a mile,” I told her as she warmed up. “Otherwise it’s not a full mile.”

“Are you sure?” she asked as we trotted up the street. “I measured it online. I thought it was a mile.”

“I measured it too,” I said, waving my hand. “It’s, like, .98 miles if you go all the way around, and then you have to do a loop around the block.”

“Oh,” she said, and that was that. Of course I was right. After all, I was the athletic one, wasn’t I?

After remembering this conversation, I grabbed my mug and headed upstairs. I went back to walkjogrun.net and redid the loop. Maybe the map was wrong. Maybe my neighborhood was much bigger than it thought it was. Sure, the site used Google Maps, but maybe Google was wrong. It was possible, right?

I quickly measured the distance again. Once I had made the final click, I looked at the distance:

1.3 miles.

!!!

I felt ridiculous. I measured the shorter loop, and sure enough, that’s the one that came out to .98 miles. That means I wasn’t running an 11:47 mile. No, I was running my usual 9:40. I wasn’t a failure; I was an overachiever.

Moral of the story: Don’t let me do basic math, not even counting.