Runner’s high and ipod catastrophe

I’ve been training with the Coach Potato to 5k  in order to get ready for the 5k I’ve entered myself in.  It’s been pretty easy, which should have alerted me right away. The program gives you two options, running for time or running for distance.  Supposedly, both will get you to the 5k at the same speed.  I’ve found out that’s a lie though.  I was running for time because I found a nice podcast, and it’s a little easier to judge time rather than distance on a podcast.

I’ve also been running on my treadmill.  I noticed that after all of my hard work the treadmill said I had only run some ridiculously small amount of mileage.  Also, after I’ve finished torturing myself it says something completely asinine, like I’ve only burned 108 calories, which I always respond indignantly”You don’t know how much extra weight I’m lugging around as I run and you don’t know how short my legs are!  If you knew that my legs are really as long as a short child’s, I’m sure you’d figure out I’ve burned more than 100 measly calories!” This is an ongoing conversation that my treadmill and I have.

So last week I decided that I really needed to run for distance.  I figure that if I don’t start training by distance, somewhere around 2.7K I’ll be done running.   My podcast will have reached the end, the podcaster will be announcing his congratulations and I’ll still be in the middle of the race.  How much would that suck?

I abandoned the podcast,  found some website that had a nice listing of “great songs to run to” and compiled a list from our already extensive music library.

Let me tell you, running for distance was a lot harder than running for time.  I don’t think I’ve ever sweated this much!

Amazingly, while I was running I finally found my rhythm.  The rhythm led to my first runner’s high in a very long time, like probably a decade. It was amazing.  My body felt like a finely oiled machine, with rhythm!

Up until that point I felt like at any moment I might literally keel over and die.  I was hot and sweaty and beginning to wonder why I had decided to run in the first place.

Turns out, my muse is Hilary Duff.  Who would have known? Who would have known that my body loves Lizzie McGuire?  I hadn’t really ever listened to anything by Hilary Duff, so the next day I put the whole album on my ipod.  I figured that she’d make the 5k a breeze.  She didn’t really do it for me, I was rather disappointed, until I came to the same song.  All of a sudden, there was the rhythm.  I was gliding.   The whole time, I was thinking to myself, “Wow, I’m a runner!”

I’m pretty sure that it was the beat.  The song was a remix version. I had a great idea. I made a playlist for all songs in our itunes with “remix”, and put them all on my ipod.  It was something ridiculous like 5 hours of music.  I figured that what I didn’t like, I could just skip past.

The next day I ran.  A good majority of the running had my finger on my ipod skipping to the next song.  I was beginning to think it was a terrible idea after the 12th skip in a row.  And then, there was Hilary again, and my rhythm.  And after Hil (because at this point we’re rather familiar) a couple of other songs kept the rhythm going.

and then there was this.

Let me tell you, it’s rather difficult to run and laugh.  There is no rhythm while you’re trying to catch a deep enough breath to laugh.