Run Day 2
April 2017
I’ve downloaded “Running with Evy” again, a running app that has guided me from couch to (almost) 5k half a year ago. Although in the meantime it has been overtaken by other running apps – it was quite the rage ten years ago when it wasn’t an app yet and you had to download her coaching podcasts to your mp3-player - it’s still quite famous in the Netherlands and Belgium. In beautiful Flemish, which is Dutch but with a French accent and cuter words, Evy tells you when to run and when to walk. She also regularly tells you she’s proud of you.
Like I said, I was almost at 5k before, but I never completed the training. At the bottom of the 30-row list (3 trainings per week, 10 weeks in a row) several green check marks are missing. I’m tempted to start again where I left off, so I won’t miss out on new green check marks -- those digital compliments that validate my efforts.
If I were to start slow, and repeat a training from, say, week 3 or 4, the ones I’ve already done and that have already been checked, I wouldn’t get new green check marks. It would be as if I haven’t been rewarded. And I can’t reset my training and gain new check marks.
I decide to be the adult here, and suck it up. Besides, I must be in a fairly good condition (right? I almost made it to 5k six months before, that must count for something?). I choose a training from week 5: four- or five-minute runs alternated with three-minute walks, in a total of thirty minutes. Easy does it!
Except that it doesn’t. Not only is my head as puffed up as it can be when I’ve downed a bottle of wine with a couple of cigarettes I swear I didn’t smoke, but this time, just a few minutes into the training, I’ve already started sweating profusely.
It’s hard. Never during the entire run do I feel the slightest sense of enjoyment. Instead, it’s pure survival -- and I look the part. I can tell by the worried looks I get from passers-by that they, too, have doubts about my chances of survival. I feel like a running – well, jolting - bad publicity stunt for exercise. And all that for no new green check marks.
I return home, sweating like a pig, red-faced and out of breath, which makes it hard for me to speak.
Great. I’ve been working out, and I look like I’m drunk.
But Evy tells me she’s proud of me.
And I agree.