Five minutes is basically forever when walking silently next to someone. What do people talk about while running? I alwaysassumed they talked about… running. So far, I don’t have anything monumental to say about it.
“So,” I start.
“We’ll do our first run in ten seconds.”
Nevermind. His watch beeps with a countdown.
“Go,” Aaron says to me. He picks up his feet and starts jogging, pulling away from me immediately. I scramble to get my legs under me and convince them we have to go faster. It takes a second for the message in my brain to reach my limbs, but it does eventually.
This isn’t so bad. I expected it to be much worse, but so far, it’s easy. Maybe I had it wrong back in high school. Did I fake all those illnesses in gym class for nothing?
I pass Aaron, whom I have mixed feelings about. On the plus side, I’m no longer staring at his pert ass. On the downside, I’m no longer staring at his pert ass.
“You might want to slow down. The goal is to run slowly, not as fast as you can.” Aaron stays a few paces behind me.
I try to take his advice, but my body is unwilling to comply. By the time he yells to me that it’s time to walk, I’m a mess. Sweat drips from my forehead as I pant, partly bent over.
That. Was. Terrible.
I was right to avoid this all those years. “How far?” I gasp. Surely that was at least a mile.
“It doesn’t matter.” Aaron puts his hand on the small of my back to encourage me to keep moving. Hopefully, he isn’t covered in my sweat now. Gross. Well, unless it comes from bedroom activities.
“I want to know.” My breathing returns to close to normal as I keep putting one foot in front of the other.
“Less than point one mile.”
It takes me several seconds to understand what he said. That can’t possibly be right. I look around and realize we didn’t even go a whole block in that time. “How long did we run?”
He doesn’t want to tell me. “Today’s run intervals are thirty seconds.”
Thirty seconds? Thirty seconds. I’m dying after thirty seconds. Suddenly, my brain is spiraling. If I’m dying now, how will I ever run a whole three miles? At this pace, that will take me a month.
“Don’t worry about it,” Aaron says as though he can read my mind. “It’s a process. It’ll get much easier as we continue to go along. I promise.”
If he was anyone else, I wouldn’t believe them. But this is Aaron. I think everything that comes out of his mouth is true. That’s not necessarily a good thing. In fact, it’s probably something to discuss with a therapist.
“Get ready. We’re going to do another thirty seconds. This time, try to run slower.”
I groan loudly because I’m not trying to hide my displeasure, but when his watch beeps, I pick up the pace again. No matter how hard I try, I can only find one speed—too fast, but also too slow.
We repeat this process a million times. Okay, Aaron says we do it five times, but I’m not sure he can be trusted with the counting. By the time we make it back to my building’s front door, I’m basically a pile of goo. My legs hurt. I’m way too hot. My clothes are drenched with sweat.
There’s something else, too—a weird feeling of accomplishment. I absolutely hate running, but I kind of like the feeling of having finished a run.
“Ready to crochet?”
No, I’m ready for a cold shower and a beer. Probably at the same time. “Let’s do it.”
AARON
Oliver has been in the shower for an extraordinarily long time. I started looking at the clock when I first realized it had been a while. Since then, it’s been ten minutes, and the water is still running.
Do I check on him? Leave him there and hope for the best? Honestly, I’m not sure.
When he asked if I wanted a shower, I waved him off. I didn’t break a sweat running with him, which I can tell annoys him to no end. I did my run, the one on my training plan, this morning so that I could focus on being next to Oliver for his run. That one nearly broke me. Speed work always does. I much prefer running long to running fast, but both are necessary if I want to keep improving my marathon time.
Doing this light effort—which was mostly working—was a good way to shake the lead out of my legs. Poor Oliver looked like he was about to pass out at the end of each segment. Learning how to slow down, not run at the fastest pace possible, is a skill that comes with time. Until then, he’s likely going to continue feeling this way. Beat up, out of breath, and exhausted.
