On the Run

Ouch.

I ran this morning, and I made my first mistake before I even left the house: I decided to leave my cell phone behind. My reasons for doing so were two-fold. Firstly, I liked the idea of getting out of the house, completely unencumbered by any connections with the outside world. Secondly, and more importantly, there was no room for the phone in the pocket of my shorts. OK, I guess that technically there was room, but not much room, and I would rather have the phone left at home for a few minutes than have it bounce out onto the street and be crushed by a Mack truck because of insufficient pocket-space.

Why, you may ask, was it a mistake to leave my cell phone at home? Because, I respond, I have the time sense of an especially slow-witted jungle sloth. Which is to say a very bad time sense indeed. Consequently, I have need of some time-keeping device for my workouts, and my cell phone is the best choice, because I am a chronic loser of watches. (But I need my cell phone, so I manage to find it each time it becomes lost.) Thus, deciding to leave my cell phone at home threw me upon the tender mercies of yet another stunted faculty in my possession: my sense of distance. This, my dear reader(s), was my second mistake.

If possible, my sense of distance is even worse than my time sense. Really, it reminds me of the passage in one of Peter's epistles where he talks about how a day is as a thousand years to the Lord -- to me, a hundred meters is like a 5K, and a 5K is like a hundred meters. It should be no surprise, then, that I got it into my head that a certain main intersection not too far from my house was about a mile off, when actually the distance was a lot more like two miles. I had intended to give myself a fairly easy run (two miles, round-trip) since I haven't been running much lately, but instead, I ended up giving myself a run that was very nearly four miles. I arrived home about 35-40 minutes later (I didn't know exactly because I seemed to have forgotten my cell phone), panting with exhaustion and vague imprecations directed at my belly in specific and the universe in general.

My knees are killing me at the moment -- I'm used to running three miles on a treadmill, not four miles over terrain -- and I'm worn out. So that's the reason for the "Ouch" at the beginning of this post. I can only hope that my pain has brought you some small amusement at my expense. If, perchance, it has, I shall count it well worth the anguish I have borne this morning.

Happy Thursday! :-)