Salutations™!! Ouch…

If you could hear me write this, I’m grunting and whining.  What’s new you may ask?  Well, not much other than this past weekend, Saturday, May 17 to be exact, I ran, er… walked in my first ever and what I vowed to be my last ever 5k.  That’s 3.10686 miles for us non-metrics out there; let’s round it to 3.11.

This started as a gimmick.  Truly, I had no real intention to run, dang it!, walk the whole 5k.  This was something that Chad Nance of Camel City Dispatch and myself were doing to promote the 5k that the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County was putting on called, Arts Move My Sole. We wanted to put together a campaign to get more people to run/walk/participate in the event.  We made videos showing our training, or better yet, what we weren’t doing for training.  You can see the videos here:

Tim Mile 1

Tim Mile 2

Tim Finishes the Race!

Anywhat!  My intention was to just show up, do a little PR for The Less Desirables brand, make out like I’m doing this thing and then just fall out and be done.  Well, that didn’t quite work out the way I planned.

Once I got started, the competitor in me said, “let’s go a little longer,” and then you get to a point where there’s really no turning back.  You have to get back to the place you began, right?  Well, I wasn’t about to be the one they had to come get on a golf cart and take back.  No way!  My back and legs were the worst during the actual event (I don’t want to call it a race).  All this weight that I’ve gained has been heck on my body and it wasn’t ready for this, but again, I dragged on.  I really do mean dragged, too.  Luckily, I had my awesome girl with me!  She was my coach, my entertainment, my motivation. Later she was my leaning pole.

When it was all over, I finished in the VERY last spot.  In fact, they were actually removing the ropes and taking up the cones by the time I arrived.  So 5k or 3.11 miles I walked, or trudged in just over an hour, one hour, three minutes, I think.  Not glamorous, by any means, but hey! as someone that was in one of the little cheering spots said, I lapped everyone sitting on the couch!  So for that I am proud.

Oliva Abby Belgium Quad with Plums from Sierra Nevada Brewing

I say it was my last 5k.  I can’t honestly say that, but in my mind, that 3.11 miles was some of the most awful physical torture I have ever been through and remember, dear readers, I had triple-bypass heart surgery.  Again, I’m sure that is an exaggeration, but it was still grueling.  As a matter of fact, I’m writing this on Wednesday, May 21 – FOUR days since the race – and my feet are still making it hard to get around comfortably.

I don’t know when, or if, I’ll do another one, but I can proudly say that I did finish this one.  Then I went to Mellow Mushroom, had a Thai Dye Pizza and a 10.2% beer… oh and PLENTY of water!  It was good, then it hurt.

So until next time, dear readers, same blog channel at SOME blog time…

Scorp’s out!