Today was upper-body only, and I did Cathe's Upper Body Pyramid simply because I didn't do it last week. I could really feel it getting after my back and pecs; dumbbells were strewn about everywhere this morning. It was a beautiful way to start the day.
I know you'd love to hear all of the nitty-gritty details of this weekend's weight-lifting and cross-training Cathextravaganza, but I feel the need to address something a person said to me about my long run on Saturday. That something was this:
"10 minutes per mile? That's not very fast. Can't you run faster than that?"
Yes. Yes I can. But there was a time when that was a blazing speed for me.
Not many of you know the story behind my first 5K, ran on June 19th, 2010. I had lost a lot of weight by 2010, and had been working out faithfully since 2005 doing everything BUT running. However, I had not quit smoking yet--I was smoking almost 2 packs a day by the middle of 2010. Yes, 40 ciggies a day for me. And all while working out for an hour every morning. Everyone always acts so incredulous when they see someone smoking after working out at the gym; I think I'm one of the few people who understand why they do it.
It really is an addiction, smoking. You have weird addict thoughts, and the ciggies take over. They lie to you. They whisper that you need them, that you can't live without them. They make you panic when you realize you're out of cigarettes, and you will risk speeding tickets and will leave your house looking like a rug they uncover at the bottom of a pile of stuff on a "Hoarders" episode just to go get a pack. One time my ciggies told me that I should keep smoking because, after all, what else would I do when I took the dogs outside?!? Just STAND THERE, for Christ's sake?
Yep. Addict thinking.
So after watching my mother-in-law die of cancer and realizing I didn't want to die that way, I decided to quit. It wasn't easy, but I made a plan based on the mathematical concept of EVEN NUMBERS. Every time I went outside to get my nicotine groove on, you see, I always smoked two ciggies. Therefore, to start down my path to nicotine-freeness, I should cut that number in half for a week. Therefore, I would reduce my overall nicotine consumption by half, and then cut that number in half the next week, and so on and so forth until I wasn't smoking any at all. Easy, I thought. Nothin' to it.
Except that first week almost killed me--killed me with a crushing sense of fatigue the likes of which I have never experienced since. I hadn't realized how much the cigs had sped up my metabolism, and I was experiencing a huge crash just by smoking HALF as much. After that went away, I did pretty well for a few weeks until I got down to 5 a day...and then I sat at 5 a day for a few weeks.
My life, unfortunately, began to revolve around those 5 cigarettes. I could think of nothing all day but when I could suck down one of those precious nicotine nuggets. I thought about them constantly. I daydreamed about them.
It was so damn pathetic.
In the middle of my pathetic 5-a-day parade, I realized that I had to go get a haircut. As I sat in the comfy chairs waiting for my best stylist ever named Courtney to finish with a customer, I saw a poster hanging on the front door of the salon that read:
"Brett's Run--5K Race."
I didn't even know how long a 5K was (I had to go home and look it up). But I did know that my husband used to run cross country in high school, so if he could do it, how hard could this running thing be? I had an entire two weeks before the race to get my training in, after all.
Well, after one day of "training," (which consisted of me thinking I could run 3 miles but almost puking after 2) I knew I couldn't be doing this smoking thing anymore. Not only did I look absolutely ridiculous having a smoke after running around the neighborhood, but I realized that to be a good runner, smoking was a definite no-no. A no-no-no-no-NO.
So I finally set a quit date. June 15th, 2010. I smoked the last of my 5 ciggies, wrote a good-bye letter to my ciggies, and gave the rest of the pack to my husband for him to dispose of at his discretion (I found out later he took them to a dumpster after he poured water all over them). The three next days between quitting and the race weren't that bad (most of my withdrawal came within my first week). On race day, I woke up all nervous and jittery; even my husband got infinitely tired of me asking, "So do I warm up NOW? How fast should I go? Should I take walk breaks? Am I heel striking? Do I warm up now?" that he rolled his eyes at me.
The best thing was that I didn't think about ciggies at all that morning. Just racing. I ran just to run, just because I could, just to have fun. And I came in at a 10:00 minute/mile pace, good enough for 10th in my age group. My first 5K. I was so proud of myself, especially of the fact that I hadn't walked once (although I thought about it quite often). I caught the running bug right then and there in the parking lot afterwards, plotting how I could get better, do better on my next run.
My 5K pace is now much faster (between 7:40 and 8:00). But I think wanting to run my first full 26.2 at my former 5K pace is a pretty reasonable goal. And a pretty damn good one. You see, everyone has a different fast, slow, good, and bad. We're all at different levels on this journey called running.
And sometimes the goal of running isn't to run as fast as you can; it's just to see if you can go the distance without suffering horrific crippling injuries. (Well, in my case it is, anyway.)
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