Preparing for Race Day

I have a race to run, and once again, I have not trained the least little bit. Last month I was supposed to run a 5K with/against a friend of mine. I didn't go running even one time to prepare for it. I ended up having to go out of town anyway, so in the end it didn't matter. But here I am, one month later, and I have another race to run. Once again, no training has been done.

To be fair, I've been going to the gym and working cardio pretty hard. If the race consisted of doing 100 squats while holding dumbbells in each hand and then whipping out 50 pushups, I could jam on that. Unfortunately for me, though, it doesn't. It just consists of someone shooting a starting pistol and then me running as fast as I can for 3.1 miles. There's an even longer race 2 hours before this one, a 6.2 mile event that I would have signed up for, but didn't due to it's outrageous 7 a.m. start time.

I'm sorry, but if I'm going to bust my ass running in blazing sun and soaking wet humidity, I'm not getting up at the crack of dawn and making sure I'm on the starting line and ready to go at 7 a.m. I just can't be expected to do that. I'm no morning person and running early in the morning has never been my thing.

My event begins at 9, after the longer 10K race has finished. My friend was angry when I told him I'd signed up for the 5K instead of the 10K because he'd hoped I'd run the 10K with him, but truth be told, we would not have been striding along, side-by-side, for much of that race even if we began it together. Especially considering that I haven't run at all in over 2 years.

So today I'm supposed to go to the gym and do my workout. There's a perfectly good classroom waiting for me, with a nice blonde instructor to push me till I puke. Or I can go upstairs and get on a treadmill and see how fast I can run 3.1 miles while going absolutely nowhere. It's boring and I forgot to bring my iPod. And I've never used those treadmills upstairs before, so I don't know how they work. I assume I'll be able to figure them out.

What I can't decide is whether or not I even want to.

UPDATE: I got to the gym and found that I had lost my combination lock. I didn't feel comfortable putting my clothes, wallet and keys in a locker without a lock, even though many others do it, so I went home and ran instead.

It was somewhat hot today and extremely humid. I haven't run in 2 years and it sure showed. I wasn't very fast. My lower back started hurting me before I'd completed the first mile. I tried to concentrate on my form, keeping it correct as best as I could. But I kept catching myself slowing down to a crawl on even the slightest inclines. Then my knee started to bother me. Then my hip joined in.

I was slow and pathetic and had the song "Psycho," by Puddle of Mudd, stuck in my head the entire time for some odd reason. According to a route mapping tool I found, I ran 3.3 miles, which is slightly longer than the race I'm preparing for, so that's a good thing, at least. My running shorts rubbed all the skin off in the inside of my right upper thigh, so there's very little chance of my running again tomorrow. I have basically 2 or 3 more runs left to me before the race, at this rate, and I doubt I'm going to improve much with so little training. I at least want to complete the race with a nearly respectible time considering my 2 years off, and I'd like to be able to enjoy it, which means hopefully I won't be in as much pain as I was today.