THE ACCIDENTAL ASIAN

“That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories”

what are we, but mortals dying everyday.

got into the 2012 Cherry Blossom 10 Miler!

dang, got into the 2012 Cherry Blossom 10 Miler.  that means i seriously need to start training.

“the hills never get better, you only get stronger”

i think that a lot of athletics are 75% mental and 25% physical.  that ratio will probably shift slightly when you are talking about competitive athletics that requires specific training and goal setting.  but for the average untrained person, being able to physically do something slightly athletic is more mental than physical.  if you mentally tell yourself to keep going, somehow your body will respond, or your brain will just shut down the portion that transmits the sensation of pain.  the image that comes to mind when is read pain are hills.  yes, hills, the bane of many athlete’s existence.  either running or cycling, the thought of hills evokes a kind of negative reaction.

the one thing that i have learned through this whole running/cycling semi-masochistic experience is to never trust someone who tells you that that was the last ‘hill’.  Ever.  because they are probably wrong.  one of my first Sunday morning shop rides, when we were winding our way back from the suburbs of Maryland, a fellow rider enthusiastically chirped “last hill” for about a quarter mile until they finally gave up.  mentally, when you hear “last hill”, you grit your teeth a little harder and dig deep for that last bit of reserved energy to make it up that last incline.  and then your mind revolts when you see before you another looming hill of pain.

this was the story of the B-CC Turkey Chase 10k 2011.  my friend who had run the course before had given me pointers; “it’s not too bad, there’s only a hill”.  now i am not much of a stickler for words, nor am i a strict grammarian.  i find lolcats to have an intriguing grammatical structure.  anyway, when someone says “hill”, in my mind that means one, une, uno.  there is an “s” in the alphabet for a reason.  to denote multiples.  going into the race, my plans of running at least once in between the Veterans 10k and the Turkey Chase 10k were disastrously ruined by work. so the mere thought of a hill was painful enough.  i am used to flat, easy courses.

thanksgiving morning, bright and early i actually get to the race with enough time to warm up.  the run itself actually was really nice.  it felt good, and my quads didn’t hurt like during the Veterans 10k.  the one thing that threw me off were the hills.  I was expecting a hill per my friends advice, but a small roller turned into two rollers.  not too bad, if it was all relatively flat from here on out i’d be good.  then came the stretches of road that seemed to go on forever.  the long slow inclines for a good 3/4 mile.  just slight enough so that you can’t really complain.  but then there were two.  what started out as a chilly morning, by the second long incline brought the sun and it ended up being really warm in an under armor thermal shirt underneath a running shirt and long leggings.

i was mentally ready for one hill, i had prepped myself to wait for the hill and then deal with it when the time came.  but by the last incline, my mental game was hanging by a thread.  bouncing around in my mind i was wondering if i was wrong about one hill that turned into four, there could be more; because there are always more.  i wondered if i should try to dig deeper now, or save my energy for the next hill that might be coming up.

overall i managed to shave two minutes off my Veteran’s 1ok time even with the hills.  but my mental race was awful.  if i hadn’t been so naive and truly believed that there was only one hill in he race, maybe my mental game would have been better.

I actually got this about a month ago.  4 hours in the chair.  Surprisingly it didn’t hurt that much.  It’s healed, and already I forget that I have a tattoo on my left side…