The Third Day is the Worst

“What happened?”

“Why are you limping?”

“Did someone hit you in the knees with a sledgehammer?”

Given my current state of motion as a hurky-jerky Night of the Living Dead extra, the last one seems the mostly likely. In fact, my legs, and specifically my calves, feel as if they’re made of painful lead weights. Weights that stretch and stab you with little knives of shooting agony at every step.

I’ve started running again.

Thanks to the magical wonder of glucosamine ,which a few studies have found assist people with moderate to severe painful joint problems to get out and exercise again, I’ve found that I can actually run and skip and jump and prance with the fairies again.

I haven’t found any fairies yet, but when I do I’m gonna prance them to death!

That will teach those fairies.

Still, all good things come with a price.

I signed up at a local gym at a huge discount through my office. I’ve never really subscribed to any one gym as being superior to any other, mostly because I’ve trained enough to not need any hand-holding for my workouts. Others may find a motivational “coach” a big boon, but most of my coaches just said, “Run that way . . . really fast. If anything gets in your way . . . turn.” It’s advice that has served me well.

So now, instead of eating lunch and adding to my ever-expanding waist-line, I go run a couple of miles. Back in the day, a couple of miles was anywhere between five and fifteen. Now, a couple of miles means just that.

Two.

Sometimes a third mile will try to sneak in there, but I’m generally pretty watchful and shut that third mile down, kicking it repeatedly until it limps away, beaten and rejected.

Starting Wednesday, I did my first run, set a pace at about 10 minutes per mile, and set out. Just for comparison, in college I would run a 10k (6.2 miles, and yes the point-two is important) pace under 7 minute miles. If you think that’s fast, the winners usually came in with paces of 5 to 6 minutes per mile. By the time I crossed the finish line, they had already accepted their medals, completed their cool-downs and were loading the bus to go eat.

The first day is always the easiest. You haven’t run in some time. You forget how grueling covering the miles can actually be, especially the tedium of being on a treadmill without any decent music to listen to. While you’re certainly out of shape, you find that the old habits die hard, muscles still function, and given even half a chance you could probably outrun most of the residents as Shady Oaks Retirement Facility. The first day was great.

You even have the delusion that since this run is so easy you could work up to your former Olympic-hopeful level when you were sixteen.

The first day is always great.

Thursday, the second day, the muscles have had time to analyze and discuss what you’ve just put them through, and traditionally their response is akin to a raging wildfire of seething agony and joint fatigue. The muscles go on a protest march, demanding a return to the status quo of lazy desk work, and nothing more taxing than setting the cruise-control.

It’s important that you do not give into their demands, even if their bargaining becomes violent.

Which is exactly what will happen on the third day.

The third day, which happens to be today, is the worst. The muscles are now a raging inferno, a runaway train of fury and molten steel. Going up stairs is not nearly as hard as going down them. You equate to Frankenstein’s Monster, with dead tissue brought back to life and forced to obey a mind with a will toward motion. You have some sense of what one day on the Bataan Death March may have felt like.

Except with out all that pesky hunger, dehydration, heat exhaustion and beatings with rifle-butts.

So today is the third day, and the third day is always the worst. Your body reflect that you chance of ever even showing up to watch the Olympics ended while Ronald Reagan was still in office. You’ve been kidding yourself that you can even walk competitively, much less run. Pain increases by orders of magnitude the older you get, which I should know by now. You either run, or you don’t run. But you don’t run then stop for three years then pick it up again.

There should be a law.

Yet, running is my addiction. It’s like cocaine, except there’s no illegality to it, and the side effects don’t include emaciation, impotence and death. Glucosamine may not be the cure for the common cold, and I still feel a little discomfort in my knees, but I can get up on the treadmill, which is much more forgiving to knees than pounding the pavement, and I can clean a couple of miles on my lunch break.