4'40"

Next Sunday I'm thinking about dragging myself at a race from Candás to Luanco. It's not such a difficult itinerary (less than 7 km), but I'm not running too often lately. That's another way of saying that I look like a trout. Maybe you won't notice at first sight, but some of my body parts are designed to distract your horrified look from any eventual overweight (and even excuse it). But I can see things that you can't (you lucky)...

Well, seriously: just exaggerating (except for the dragging part).

I only have one or two training sessions before the race (which, by the way, can offer a pretty good idea of what's bound to happen) to pathetically try to avoid a complete failure. So today I tried. I run 6 km in about 27'42", which gives a mean of about 4'40" per km. My fastest km took 4'23". I did this in a perfectly flat track (which I won't face next Sunday), and to achieve that I had to border on a heart attack (twice) and ostensibly try to move my legs when they started to think for themselves that no more steps were necessary. But hey, this is a very, very good time for me, even when it would make any serious practitioner to roar with laughter.

But, you know what? I'm definitely not a serious practitioner. And if anyone of them laughs at me during the race, I'll kill him by a brutal kick in his stomach, and then I'll repeatedly jump over his corpse, and then I'll run waaaaay faster than him. Who's laughing now, you... eeeh... corpse?

One of my friends, who will probably participate as well, is able to run below 3'50" per km. To achieve that, I would probably have to lose 25% of my body weight, and run mercilessly for several months as if a herd of wolves was trying to chew my buttocks, and even then I would only be able to see his back as a small point on the horizon. So it could (just could) be easier to kick him and jump over his corpse.

Neither losing half or myself and escaping from imaginary beasts, nor being so unfriendly and impolite, are appealing options. So I will probably let myself go up and down the road, fighting the (likely) cold and rain, trying to be under 5'30" per km and to arrive when the locker room is still open and the finishing line has not been lifted yet, for absolutely no prize whatsoever.

But I'm too old to be self-conscious anyway.

And we're planning to have lunch together after the race.

And, suddenly, everything starts to make sense.