I ran a 10k this weekend, and it was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
I ran a 10k for breast cancer on Sunday in Calabasas, and though the cause was wonderful, someone should have told me beforehand you’re allowed to donate to charities without having to run six-and-a-half miles afterward. How this loophole slipped past me I don’t know, but I won’t soon forgive myself.
The first terrible thing about this 10k was that it happened at the same time as the Malibu Half-Marathon, which means nobody cared about what I saw as a life-affirming accomplishment. When I posted a picture to Instagram, it was sandwiched between two photos of half-marathon finishers. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, mine got the point across in 30: “I’m so lame and pathetic I just ran a half-half-marathon instead of challenging myself like the photos you’ll see above and below this, and now my knees feel like putty.” When I got home I waddled into my room with the prudence of an elderly statesmen; my roommate was basically doing sprints in the distance between the kitchen and his room.
He ran the half-marathon earlier, and looked just as healthy as the minute before his race. I had run six miles, and was already googling, “Knee+Sore+Euthanasia.”
Another terrible thing about the race was that half of it was uphill. The optimistic reader might say, “but then half of it was downhill,” to which I say calm down and just let me have this one. No one told me the simple 10k I thought I was running would turn into the brutal equivalent to climbing Kilimanjaro. Seriously though, Calabasas has the elevation climb of a large mountain.
Other terrible things that happened to me include: a Hunter Hayes song came on twice in the same playlist and really bummed me out, a sweet little girl handed me water at mile three, and I wasn’t coordinated enough to maintain a normal pace and also get the water in my mouth, and I drank a Red Bull minutes before the race and had lost feeling in my chest by mile two.
But the most awful thing that happened to me at the 10k on Sunday was that at the very end, as my legs felt like they would break any moment, and I found the last bit of energy inside myself to reach the finish line, some old geezer came sprinting past me in an effort to finish higher on the results board. There must have been 200 people at the finish line cheering us on, and here is this geriatric punk making me look like an idiot. So I sprinted past him and totally beat him, which was awesome and rewarding and not the least bit pathetic on my part. But the greater issue is how embarrassing that could’ve been for me. I can’t even imagine.
I guess it wasn’t all bad, though. The sponsors raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer research, and support groups tangibly got together to display the strength of will power and community, and afterwards, I even felt like I had a good time.
I just wish my playlist wouldn’t have repeated those Hunter Hayes songs.
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Follow Ben Holcomb on Twitter: @BenjaminHolcomb
As published in the Nov. 14 issue of the Pepperdine Graphic.
