Bo-Bo Knows Movie Montages

I'm in training for my corporate 5k. I'm the karate kid. I'm gonna be your man in motion!* I'm on the highway to the danger zone.** I'm Rocky freakin' Balboa.

Alas, when I'm doing the actual running (and not romanticizing the jogging into a cheesy eigthties movie montage) I feel more like the fly in the karate kid's chopticks. Like all I need's a pair of wheels.* Like I most definitely have the need for speed.*** Like Rocky's swollen pulp of a face when he screams, "Adrian!"

I've concluded that jogging is for the birds, and birds FLY everywhere, so what the hell does that tell you? I have a theory that the only way seemingly sane people turn into joggers is by addicting their bodies to the endorphin release at the end of all that knee-pounding goodness. The afternoon following my first consecutive eight-minute jog* since college, I giggled like I'd been drinking wine. The next day, my legs felt so strong, I choreographed a little soft shoe while waiting for my tea water to boil. And as the number of consecutive jogging minutes increased (I'm up to 25 now**), I found that my personality split while I ran.

To the part of me that bent my head down and grumbled about the ridiculousness of doing something that made my legs feel like Rocky's swollen pulp of a face, the burgeoning endorphin junkie reminded me that a few minutes of dead legs and searing lungs were a reasonable price to pay for a general sense of laughing-like-a-loon well being. To the part of me that wondered how I could possibly be making progress when I felt so bad, my inner Richard Simmons was pointing out how I'd gone about a tenth of a mile further than I had during my second 25-minute run.

To that I say, oh whoopy.

Tomorrow I will get up, walk Bo for 25 minutes then go out and run for 25 more. And by run I mean jog. And by jog I mean a bouncing-like step that clocks in at roughly ten minutes per .9 miles. The corporate team I'm running the 5K with is well aware of my (lack of) jogging prowess, and though I've joked that my loftiest goal is to come in dead last, I'm starting to think about how bad dead last will actually feel. Maybe I'll be laughing too hard to notice I suck as badly as the jerk that swept Danielson's leg.

* Lyrics from "St. Elmo's Fire" by John Parr

** Lyrics from "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins

*** From Top Gun

**** Condescending marathoners need not comment on this post, thank you.

***** Ditto, marathoners.