If You’d Like to Imagine Me as the Female Rocky, I Won’t Stop You*

*Note: I have never actually seen Rocky.

I apologize for being completely absent from the internet for the past couple of weeks. It’s just that I’ve only got LESS THAN ONE WEEK left at my job, and then after that only ONE WEEK to pack up all my things and move and start my new life as a grad student. And also, did I mention that I’m trying to write a rough draft of an academic paper before I leave, and I have no idea what I’m doing? I’m kind of freaking out, and my whole life is a shambles, and that leaves very little time for having fun on the internet. But enough about that!

In addition to being extremely anxious and useless for the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new goal, intended to increase the awesomeness of my life by 125%. Now that I’ve gotten through about 2 weeks of it and I’m confident that I can, in fact, complete it, I feel safe telling the world about it.

Internet, I am training for an imaginary 10k.

For those of you that aren’t into the metric system, 10k = a little over 6 miles. Now, don’t misunderstand, the training I am doing is totally real. But the 10k race that usually happens at the end of such a training regimen is totally imaginary. I mean, I imagine I’ll run 10k on the day that my training schedule tells me to, but I won’t be racing against anything but the wind. I didn’t want to sign up for an actual race because I’ve never run one before, and I was afraid that I would end up in the hospital with a flare-up of my chronically debilitating Slow And Lazy (SAL, a devastating disease that I’ve battled my entire life, poor pitiful me). All in all, I thought it was best to play it safe and run an imaginary race, instead. Here, just to convince you of the wisdom of my decision, let me give you an impromptu list of reasons an imaginary race is better than a real one:

1)You can fit it into your schedule whenever you like
2)You can choose the flattest, most shadiest route available
3)You’re guaranteed to be the fastest runner in the race
4)When no one will give you money to run because they don’t have any confidence in your questionable athletic skills, you can just remind yourself that you’re not actually doing this for charity, and you don’t have to feel like you’re personally disappointing children with cancer

Anyway, I decided to do this because I was getting pretty sick of my gym and had kind of stopped going, and on top of that, when I move away, I won’t be able to afford a fancy gym membership and I’ll need to find other ways to motivate myself. This method is pretty easy, because you can find training schedules all over the internet, designed for people with varying degrees of badassitude. (My badassitude rating = 3.4. I am not telling you how high the scale goes.) Here’s the training plan that I’m using. As you can see, it is 8 weeks long, and involves running all of the damn time. It’s nice though, because it just tells you what to do, so it appeals to the side of me that just wants to mindlessly follow someone else’s instructions. Also, you can print it out and put a little check by each day's run when you complete it, which appeals to the side of me that likes to check things off lists. I just say all of this in order to put an end to any concerns you may have had that now that I’m a hardcore athlete I’m no longer an incredibly huge nerd. I will ALWAYS be an incredibly huge nerd.

What I don’t really understand about this whole endeavor, though, is how unbelievably slowly I run. Somehow, I’ve unknowingly devised a way to run that actually takes LONGER than it would to just walk to wherever you’re going. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I SLEEP faster than I run. I’ll go out and run my 2 miles, feeling like I’m running at a fairly respectable speed, and then I get done and find out that it’s taken me roughly 3 days to run around my neighborhood. I can only assume that I am some sort of undiscovered superhero, and my superpower is warping the space-time continuum with the force of my painfully slow running.
Here is an excerpt from an actual conversation that I overheard yesterday, between a father and son as they watched me run by:

“She’s obviously running hard, look how red her face is!”
“I know son, but how is that we’ve been standing here for 3 hours and she’s only traveled 20 feet?”
“My God, Dad, what’s happening to you?!?”
“AAUUUGHH! My hair is turning gray and my face is wrinkling as we speak! THE HORROR!”

My point is, if anyone wants to get together sometime and help me come up with a superhero name (Señorita Slo-Mo, perhaps?), maybe sew up a nice cape-and-mask combo, I’d really appreciate the support. I’m also in need of a wise old mentor (like a Morgan-Freeman-in-Batman-Begins type) to help me learn how to control my powers and wield them for good, rather than for evil. It’s tough out there for a new superhuman just learning the ropes.