Life lessons

I went for my 5K run this yesterday (a sentence that I still find ludicrous) and something slightly odd happened which revealed two important life lessons to me which I pass on to you. I know that four laps of my local park are just over 5K but I lost count at three; was it three or was it four? If Dirty Harry had asked me if he had fired six shots or only five and if I felt lucky, punk, I would have told him that I was awfully sorry but I could not help him and that there was no need for that kind of language. Anyway I thought I'd better do an extra lap just to make sure because I didn't want to do less and it would be a bonus if I did an extra kilometre.

About a quarter of the way into the final lap I felt tired. I thought that it really must be an extra one and I pushed myself a bit in the knowledge that I was quite possibly setting a new personal record. I wear a Fitbit which records the time and distance and through gritted teeth, with sheer dogged determination I carried on to the bitter glorious end. When I got home I checked the distance on my phone and it was 5.1K so it had been three laps after all when I got confused! I was gutted that I hadn't broken my record whilst being relieved that I had done my allotted 5K and bewildered why the last lap was so much harder than it usually is. Was it because I became convinced that I had run further, I thought?

The lessons learned are that the mind is a powerful thing and can alter our perception and affect our very physiology, for good or ill. Secondly, bloody well play attention in maths class.

[ButtercupKid Graduate]

Maths class would have been even harder if they’d made us run round the field at the same time 😄

[tadornas Graduate in reply to ButtercupKid]

That would have been child-me's actual worst nightmare...

[ButtercupKid Graduate in reply to tadornas]

Almost. They just needed to fit the physics class in there too 😄

[tadornas Graduate in reply to ButtercupKid]

Arrgh! 😂

[ButtercupKid Graduate in reply to tadornas]

😁

[Hidden in reply to ButtercupKid]

I can just see it - running round the square on the hypotenuse ..!

[ButtercupKid Graduate in reply to Hidden]

Groan 😁

[UnfitNoMore Graduate]

Great running... many of the “serious” runners near me cram into one park (400+) while a park 2 miles away is almost empty (50- runners) each Saturday morning. There’s 2 reasons, the empty park is 3 laps and it gets muddy. So, running obviously impairs the ability to count... and they don’t want to get their lovely bright running shoes muddy!