In the hospital in which I work...the highest compliment that one can receive from your colleagues is "Sho you're a Trooper". A trooper being an adventurous, ready to try new things, reliable and AWESOME team player. So when I got a call from the Medical Workshop department last week asking if myself and my friends were 'trooper enough' to sign up for an undisclosed event...I immediately declared we were and signed us all up.
This mysterious event turned out to be a 5 km run (which I later renamed as a 5km run/walk) leaving from our local sports club at 6:30 on Sunday morning...yes SUNDAY...the day of rest, the last opportunity to sleep in before another week of early mornings!!! I was not sure why I had been invited to this event...but I suspected that it was Karma paying me back after a had caused trouble somewhere along the way. Being the trooper I was, I stuck to my promise and awoke before it was light on Sunday morning to get ready for a race which was exactly 10 times longer than the longest distance I had ever run in my life. I gathered anything I could find that made me look remotely athletic, including a pair of netball tackies, sweat bands, gym pants and a sports bra, and I swallowed a few too many tablespoons of powdered 'Game' energy drink. Now that I looked like a poorly coordinated sports model with a severe case of ADHD I knew I could conquor anything :-)
The run started with six thousand-and-something people shuffling to get as close to the starting line as possible, while I performed my essential stretches, which involved me showing as many people as would watch how I could climb through my double jointed arms. In hindsight I don't think these stretches were really necessary but they sure did attract the glances of some unusual characters. As the starting gunshot went, signalling us to start running, myself and my friends shared a few awkward comments about how this was just a fun run and we didn't care if we finished or not, and then we started running. As you may have picked up, I've never been much of a runner...but when you find yourself standing in the middle of a road surrounded by the oddest collection of people, who all have one goal you seem to find the motivation to run to the next corner... and the next marshal... and the next water point. This motivation came mainly from the people surrounding me, as I ran I would look around at the people and find a reason to keep running, such as the mom ahead of me who was pushing a pram with one baby in it, while carrying a second baby in a giant harness strapped to her back, and I thought...like hell I'm letting this overloaded mom beat me...and so I kept running until I saw a man running with one leg and crutches in front of me and I thought... if he can do it, I absolutely can and I kept running until I saw a 5 year old child with a Mohawk ahead of me running like it was no body's business and so I kept running. I'll be honest there were many a walk breaks during this time, and some curse words either said or at least thought when my friend Shavaughn encouraged me to keep running even though my legs were telling me otherwise.
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| THE MEDAL |
In order to maintain my trooper status I will be doing the future races, but next time I will be more prepared, as I have found a website on my ever faithful pinterest which has a training program called couch to 5km in 2 months, click here to check it out. My amazing friend and self proclaimed coach, Shavaughn, has also introduced me to another awesome site called Race Results which has all the pamphlets of the up and coming road races in South Africa.
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