Taking the Discomfort to the Run

Well, I did it. I was feeling so tired and miserable that I couldn’t stand to do a full workout like I’d planned. Therefore, I made myself a deal.

If I could run to the point of being uncomfortable until 5pm, then I could stop running at 5pm. My meeting ran late, so I didn’t get to the track until 4:35. Surely I could run hard for 25 minutes.

My FiveFingers shoes had been giving me blister issues when I ran for more than 20 minutes at a stretch. Something about my gait or the way that I’d worn them in made my big left toe scrape across some part of the inside construction until the skin was worn right off (not pretty). I almost gave up on the shoes at that point, but I decided instead to try toe socks.

Now, I tried toe socks once before. I used to be very into socks, and I received as a present a pair of rainbow toe socks from a friend right before I left for college. I was excited, because each toe was a different color of the rainbow, and my other rainbow socks were getting rather worn out.

Then I put them on. And immediately took them off. Maybe they were cheap socks, or maybe toe sock technology simply wasn’t developed enough back in ‘01, but my poor little toes felt like they had nooses around their bases with those socks on. I swore off toe socks forever.

Forever turned out to be until I bought some toe socks from REI, Injinji toe socks. They aren’t perfect. My toes don’t fill out the toe spaces completely, and they do feel rather odd around the bases of my toes, but they don’t strangle my toes, and they do prevent that spot on my big toe from getting worn away by my FiveFingers.

I’m still not sold on all toe socks, but these particular ones aren’t bad. They did keep the discomfort of the run mostly out of my feet. Mostly, because I did have some issues with my right foot going numb. I think that’s just a gait thing though. The most uncomfortable part was the breathing, and convincing myself to keep going even though it hurt.

I don’t feel that running has come naturally to me. All through school, running the mile was torture. I’ve never been comfortable running at a decent pace, a pace that wouldn’t make my brother (and brother-in-law) scoff. I did recently learn that the 11 laps to a mile distance at the Rec center applies to the middle lane, so running the outside lane like I do means I’m going more than a mile in 11 laps. But I don’t know how much more. If it were 11 laps to a mile, then I would have been running just under an 11 minute mile pace.

But it’s not. So I had to have been going faster. And to do a 5K in just over 30 minutes (like I did in Vegas), I had to be doing better than 10 minutes per mile.

So I ran, pushing the pace as hard as I felt I could sustain. My stomach reminded me that I hadn’t had a snack before starting to run. My lungs protested that I was overdoing it. My heart pounded, too busy for extraneous commentary. And I ran the seconds down with each lap.

The plan was to stop when I hit 5pm, but I was running fast enough that when I had 2 laps to go, I came in under the minute. I would have to go 2 more laps to hit 5pm (instead of just 1 more).

Or I could slow down.

My husband would have rewarded himself for running fast by stopping early.

I rewarded myself for running fast by running an extra lap.

26 laps of the outside lane in 25 minutes and 28 seconds.

I’ve really got to find out just how much longer those laps are!