Sunday morning had arrived. I stood outside Andy's house at 5:45 a.m. with butterflies in my stomach in my finest cotton t-shirt, basketball shorts, cotton socks, and three year old running shoes. I was ready to do this thing, I knocked on the door.
Andy came out and greeted me. We did a few stretches, or what I called stretches. I took a deep breath and reached for my toes, I made it to my shins. Just like that, without any grand ceremony we were off.
We started out easy, it felt great to be out so early and getting to watch the sun come up as we ran. Like most Florida mornings it was so humid you could feel the dampness in the air. I had already broken into a sweat from the attempted toe touch, now only a few minutes in I could feel the sweat starting to pour. Once my muscles were warmed up and my stride evened out it seemed almost effortless. That moment was brief.
About five miles into the run we were near the local community college so we decided to stop for some water. By this point my cotton t-shirt was soaked through and my shoes felt like wet sponges. It was at this point Andy informed me that our pace had been a little fast and we should slow it down. Hearing that was one of those rare moments you felt you could hug a man. Then he said we were at the halfway point and all that warm fuzzy feeling went away.
It felt better to run at the slower pace, but I hadn't forgotten he said we were only halfway. I did the math pretty quick in my head. Ten miles. I wasn't going to make it, someone was going to find me wandering the streets delirious, probably suffering from amnesia. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse I noticed some discomfort in a place I had never felt discomfort before.
I noticed my nipples beginning to feel warm and then it quickly progressed into a full on burn. It was as if I had decided my nipples stuck out too far and the only solution was to sand them down. I just knew that when I finally stopped running I would have perfectly smooth nipples. The pain was excruciating.
That's when it happened. In the middle of all that misery, I was having a moment of great revelation. There I was, Andy had left me in his dust, all alone with no reason to keep going yet, I was still running. Now I'm sure if you asked anyone who might have witnessed this they would not describe me as a man running. Mainly because it appeared I was limping along having a seizure while holding my shirt out, Madonna cone-style, away from my now bleeding nipples, contorting my face in ways that would make Jim Carrey look like an amateur. Never the less, I was still running. The revelation was that somehow through all this pain I felt great, I was now officially a runner.
Andy was waiting for me when I finally reached his house. He said he was sorry about running further than we planned. My reply was, "No problem, it was great". I'm not saying you have to run ten miles to be able to call yourself a runner. It's the realization that you don't have to keep going when you're feeling your worst, but you truly want to. In running as in life, we can all do more than we think we can.
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