Race for the Cure

This morn­ing was the Race for the Cure for breast can­cer and my work­place put togeth­er a team of folks to par­tic­i­pate. I was the only one who signed up to do the run, so it was me run­ning alone, as usu­al. Apart from the humon­gous crowd of course. But last night I hung out at the Lit for awhile and watched Mr. Man­ly Pad ply his trade until Liam showed up. He’s been acti­vat­ed. He’s prob­a­bly going to end up in Iraq. Well, fuck. He’s in the Nation­al Guard and trained for med­ical sup­ply, but since Iraq needs com­bat sol­diers, he’s get­ting retrained for “nation build­ing activ­i­ties.” Since last night was my only night to hang with him while he is in town this week­end, we had a few beers on me. Hope­ful­ly he won’t be kept too far away from his year old daugh­ter. I real­ly hope he does­n’t get him­self killed. Know­ing him, he’d haunt my Guin­ness.

Then I got up at 7 this morn­ing and biked to Voinovich Park which was like a street fair or some­thing. I had a decent warm-up and was ready to race at the 8:00 sched­uled com­pet­i­tive race start time. Appar­ent­ly they decid­ed at the last moment to just com­bine the race and walk togeth­er so we all stood around for 15 min­utes in the rain, feel­ing our mus­cles tight­en up and get cold. The race start­ed and the first mile or so was a mad­ness of swerv­ing and sud­den speed changes, real­ly threw off my pace. My pace did­n’t real­ly mat­ter though because there were no dis­tance mark­ers apart from the water at the halfway point, so I had no idea how I was doing. My time was 26:51 or there­abouts. I’m con­tent with that, con­sid­er­ing the con­di­tions. The bike ride home was not fun. My hands were numb and my mus­cles were like lit­tle yap­py dogs with acid dogslob­ber. I just got done mop­ping the floor.

[UPDATE: My $20 bet­ter be the $20 that funds the find­ing of the cure because I’m sick­er than dogshit now.]