UCSD Campus Loop: 4.01 Miles: 32:08 (8:02 min/mile)
The other night I was watching According to Jim on TV and his sister-in-law bet him that he could not beat her in the marathon, let alone finish. So what his plan was to start off ridiculously slow and trail off and hide somewhere while everyone else was running the race. He would then re-emerge back into the race and finish just ahead of his sister-in-law. Well, he dozed off during his pedicure (lol) and thought he wasn’t going to make it, so he started running to the finish. As he approached the finish line, he noticed the tape hadn’t been broken through; he was leading the race! The “real” first place runner was right behind him, obviously a lot more tired, so they battled it out and Jim won!
I recently experienced a situation very similar to that, but unintentionally, of course. I was running the campus loop (route that the shuttle takes) and noticed that there were people standing around the trail where local cross country races take place. So I assumed they were having a race on the trail, but I noticed chalk arrows on the cement on the route I was running. Then I noticed a couple of other runners ahead of me and people standing at the corners wearing some type of volunteer t-shirts. I accidentally jumped into a race and were passing people ahead of me and having the volunteers cheer for me!!
Now this was only in the first half mile of my run, so I felt perfectly fine (not tired) as I was passing what looked like high school runners. Of course, I felt very bad about it and I wasn’t intentionally trying to pass them. So during this time I kept thinking to myself: “Can I get away with it? What if I’m where the front-runners are and I could medal? Would they notice if I have a bib or not or ask for my name after the finish?” Was this something that I could really do and not feel bad about it?
I literally came to a crossroads at one point in the run because I noticed volunteers pointing the runners to go straight, but the route for the Campus Loop that I originally planned to run was to turn right. And it was here where I knew that it was not right to go straight and just go back into my run. There was a part of me that was hoping that one of the volunteers would catch up to me and tell me that I was going the wrong way. But that never happened..
Back to the real run: I tried to run that loop about a month ago and didn’t think that I would run it well, so I did about half of the loop and just cut across the campus. This time, I kept thinking to myself that I knew I could do it, so I just kept running. The time was not my fastest (I used to run this when I went to school here and would go a lot faster). But this is a good starting point for me to improve upon the next time I run it. Hopefully I won’t crash into any other races next time, unless it’s one that I’m supposed to be running in.