Thursday, June 16, 2011
Race issues
I am thinking this morning about race issues. Specifically, the competitive effort involved. I think I did the Indianapolis mini marathon twice. Definitely not more than three times. I did races in physical education classes and track'n'field days in my schooltimes and all that, and in late elementary school or early junior high I did a polar bear run with a friend. I'm pretty sure that a polar bear run is when you run when it is cold out. Sometimes I even do a point A to point B race out of a blue. I am pretty sure a point A to point B race is a too-long term I just made up for when somebody says "HEY I'LL RACE YOU TO [point B]" when you are both theoretically at a point A. But here is the point (C?) I am getting at : I am not a guy what likes to run for much. There is something about running I don't typically enjoy very much. I think it is the part where you have been running and your lungs feel all burny and your whole body gets sore and your extremities can tell that blood is no longer reaching them or how afterwards my saliva becomes inexplicably thick and I have to spit, which is entirely unsightly. Maybe my endorphins are broken, I don't know.
But sometimes, I am still in a footrace. Don't get me wrong, I did not lie to you last paragraph. If it is over a mile, I am walking. But I realized, if I am walking, I am probably not "racing" as they say. I was still beating a lot of other people that were walking, though, as walking slowly was not really a thing to me then. But unless you are a proverbial hare or a person who dies at mile 6, if you were running, I was not going to beat you. So what was I racing against?
Well, I was told that if you were going under a 15 minute mile (like maybe you took a nap for 3 of those minutes) you would be pulled out, so maybe that was a factor. But this was not true of the polar bear run I did with my friend Colin. I think this one was maybe a 5K or so. In this one, if you were slower, they just picked up the traffic cones that showed where you were supposed to be going. What I am getting at is that we got lost. Colin was in sort of a running family, if that is a real thing, and his parents ran that day and he was ready to run too. (I think I heard he had a cousin that ran too [an also-ran], if you want to know every detail. I am sort of assuming you do if you are still reading this mess.) I ran with him at first, but like a good friend, I stayed with him when my stomach started to cramp up and he had to slow down. Eventually we ended up in a cul-de-sac.
That last one was more of a case of the "had-to-stops," but what I am thinking is: How many people have to be in a race before I am comfortable not being competetive? And how competetive are the other however-many hundred people in a marathon that finish in the bottom half? Maybe they are competing against themselves, but we all know that will be a tie, right?
When Uncle Mike said he could run backwards faster than me though, I was in that all out. And when Bob wanted to race to anime club? I was in maybe the only-ever race to an anime club. In elementary school track and field events, I always ran for serious too, even though I was a LOSER.
Patrick Jasin always won those.
But one thing stands out in my mind about all this. When I walked in the mini marathon with my parents, at some point around the last mile, my dad would just take off at a run. Why did he do that? Did he think people would assume he'd been running like that the whole time and thought he'd try and lap them or something? Because when you've been lightly jogging for three hours and some guy passes you at a full run, you're not going to think he's the real deal and maybe just started an hour and half late or something. One year, Mom and I lost him and had to hunt him down at the finish line. They weren't out of snacks yet, so that couldn't have been the reason. And he used one of the provided porta-potties around mile 11 if that is what you're thinking, Princess Poopnpee.
To wrap up, I guess the big point I am trying to make at a deeper human level here is that I have no clue why he did that.
Labels: dads, important race issues, poopnpee, unauthrorized Bobby photo use
# posted by Gug Lurge @ 8:13 AM 
