May 9, 2006

Will run for beer

Found myself doing laps around the Memorial Hall track Saturday for 2 hours, 30 minutes. Run 8 minutes, beep goes the countdown timer, walk 2 minutes, beep again. Repeat.

Sounds excruciatingly boring, but really I was loving it. Nice breeze. Could feel the heat radiating off the track surface. There was enough coming-and-going activity with a few walkers, a few soccer players, the ocassional runner and then even a military helicopter landing (no, not a hallucination: JMU's military science/ROTC folks are there and, well, it WAS graduation Saturday so ... )

Anyway, I hit a terrible bad patch about 1h45m into the run. Feet hurting. Left knee talking. Breeze stopped and, although I had been sucking fluid from my Camelbak the whole run, I was getting overheated.

That's when it hit me. "OK, look, here's the deal: Make it to 2h30m and you get a quart of beer. Stop before that, and you go home a whiner." A few minutes later, I was sailing again. Those final 40 minutes were by far the best of the run.

Amazing what the body can do when the brain gets out of the way.

Wonder how Will Run 4 Beer would look as a tattoo?

1 comment:

Fur maid said...

Maybe you need it as a print on the back of your shorts instead. There is probably space.