Jingle Bell Jog
A Story about Running
He hadn’t gone to the Jingle Bell Jog. It was alright, when he had nothing else. But today was for work, and so he went to the track.
There was a fence around the track and the gate was closed and the college had put up a sign telling the public to keep out and the students were all gone and nobody was there and Cassius jogged up and vaulted over the gate onto the red surface below because he figured he paid enough taxes and it was a state school so they owed him one.
The three-mile jog to the track had warmed him up, but Cassius jogged a lap anyway. If someone was going to come and kick him off, better to do it before he’d begun.
The lap completed, he went through a few skipping drills and ran some striders. Then he took a moment to walk around and swing his arms and puff white breaths in the dry air.
The workout was eight by thousand meters, with a six hundred recovery in between. The goal was to start at his pace for five thousand meters and finish the last one at his pace for three. Not for the faint of heart.
Cassius stayed controlled all through the first one. Experience had given him a cold discipline that he’d lacked in his youth, and he managed to contain his pace for the second as well. Every two hundred he glanced at his watch, to make sure it read, “35, 70, 105, etc.” His watch didn’t actually read, “70.” It read, “1:10,” but Cassius read, “70.”
Now, he began to pick up the pace ever so slightly. Already, the pain was on him – even if the workout had been eight by thousand just at five thousand pace, it would have been a nightmare. One of those days where you hurt from the start and there’s nothing for it but to get through it.
Halfway through, the six hundred jog was sweet relief. He was perhaps a little too slow on the fourth, still too close to five thousand pace, but that was good. Better that than the alternative. If he was going to negative split this the whole way, he would need to be slow in the first half.
Five was the worst one mentally. When you were on the fifth interval out of eight, you were further from finishing than you were on the first interval. The thousands stretched out before him and the minutes piled up interminably into the future. He gasped with pleasure when he hit the line at the end of the fifth and he dropped to a jog that was barely more than a walk.
It seemed both that a long time was passing and that he was outside of time and had all the time in the world and he no longer cared how slow he ran on the fifth recovery jog. He didn’t want to have to start again.
But soon enough, he did. He hit the line and was away and sprinting again, and the pain was instantaneous as he was caught up into the tumultuous fury that was one thousand meters at the pace of maximum oxygen consumption. Cassius could no longer think, but if he could think he might have wondered idly why the human body consumed less oxygen at even faster paces. He would have figured that it had something to do with anaerobic processes taking over, but he knew only as much as he needed to know and this kind of question was beyond him.
After one lap, it seemed to him that the workout would never be over. The time after didn’t exist. The return jog barely existed. Life before, while it existed, was severed from him and could not be touched. There was no time other than this time and this time became all eternity.