Dog Dash 10 K

Last week I was going to go visit my family, but they were all sick (probably with H1N1) with fevers up to 102F, vomiting/diarrhea, and cough. I decided that I didn't actually love my family enough to exchange a 1 day visit for a 10 days of swine-flu nastiness. So last Saturday I went to buy a new pair of exercise/running shoes. At the shoe store they had a place to sign up for the Dog Dash 10K. The trauma and body-aches of running the Beat the Bridge 8K were just distant enough in my memory for me to think that running the 10K Dog Dash sounded like fun. On an impulse decision I decided to sign up for it, and showed up bright eyed and bushy-tailed for the run the next morning. During the run, I decided that the 10K somehow completely defied the rules of physics - it felt AT LEAST 3 to 4 times longer than a 5 K. How is that possible? I was trying to decide during the race if it was because in the past I have always running with people and during the 10K I was running by myself, but in the end it didn't really matter. It is still a terrible thing to put your body through. I got an email about a week later saying that there was a picture available of me during the race. Here it is:



However, if the camera had been a James Bond x-ray camera that could see my thoughts at the time of the picture, the photograph may have looked a little more like this:




I find the phenomenon of running in organized events/races very odd. The entire race you can be thinking: "What an absolutely terrible experience. I will never never do that again." But then, somehow at the end of the race you get this rush of adrenaline and finish feeling great. Strangely at the finish line your twisted ego-boosted mind comes up with the thought, "That wasn't so bad. I could totally do that again and probably run longer." Then months later, the feeling at the end of the race is the only thing you remember and you stupidly sign up for another. A very strange phenomenon indeed. With this phenomenon in mind, I will say that I had fun time running the 10K dog dash and being a low-achieving jog-walk-runner I was pleased with by final average time being around a 9 minute mile. Perhaps after a suitable amount of time passes so I forget the body pain I experienced this week, I might run another race. We will see.