It seems I did it again, committed to something that would have great effects if it works, but that has such a low chance of success even I'm wondering if I'm crazy to even try it.
To sketch the situation, I'm an IT geek who's daily exercise exists of walking up 2 flights of stairs a few times a day and then sitting still between hourly walks to the water cooler.
So when last week an email circulated at work that some people where signing up for something called a Spartacus run, I barely read past the title before skipping it.
Today however, my colleague brought it up again as he was trying to find more people to represent the IT department together with him and so I opened the site to have a look what it was actually about.
Spartacus run 2014, it turns out, is in the recreational domain right next to my door and it's a 10 km run with 15 obstacles along the way.
I do know myself enough to know that I can't run 1 km before falling over from exhaustion, but I can walk 10 km without too much trouble. And since my colleague kept mentioning that he was planning to do it at a walking pace, combined with the start being practically in my garden, I relented and signed up.
So now I've got about ten weeks to cultivate something resembling a healthy condition with which to try and finish the run. So what do I do? I turn to the sports enthusiast in the family, my sister and brother in law, who seem to actually enjoy walking up and down mountains. After sending off a mail and actually working a bit (since this is all still happening during the work hours :p ), I get a reply...
'You foul'... followed by a quite thorough mail explaining why I'm crazy thinking I can finish this run with only two months training and suggesting I try the next one in a year and two months, since that would be more realistic.
And the bloody mail actually made a lot of sense, which was of course the most annoying of it all. I had once again committed to something in my foolish go-lucky optimism while down inside me a tiny voice was trying to wake up my sense of logic, only to be silenced until about 5 minutes after I'd signed up.
Luckily, about half an hour after the 'you foul' mail, a second, slightly more positive mail followed, in which my sister did give some advice for if I would still try it, even if it was just for the team spirit and the dead drop about halfway. So there was still some hope.
So... why am I boring the mirror with all this?
Because I still got a sliver of home that I might finish the run and become a Spartacus.
And I'm working on a plan, a plan so cunning, you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel!
First I looked for some training programs, the most popular in belgium (start to run) takes 10 weeks to get you up to 5 km, a nice condition boost which could help a lot.
A bit more looking around, including for apps I could put on my smartphone to help me run and satisfy my data hunger and I found Zombies, Run! 5k Training which is similar to start to run but does 5 km in 8 weeks, which gives me some extra margin, and it's in a game format, which is always a plus.
So I'm once again feeling a bit more optimistic.
Now just to broadcast to the world that I committed to this so I'll have a harder time backing out due to peer pressure and hopefully I can keep myself motivated. After all, it's only two months until I enter the arena.