Last year, shortly after we closed on the Dollhouse, we signed up for and participated in the Rose City 5K Walk. I thought it’d be fun (it was) and I figured it would be a good way to see more of our new neighborhood (the walk starts and ends about 3 blocks from our door), not to mention it sounded like something to do to get us moving that wouldn’t be boring or pointless (okay, debatable about the pointless part as we’re walking in a circle, but anyway).
My only goal, really, was that we not be the last people to cross the finish line.
We weren’t (though we were close). Our final time was 1:06:07, I believe.
Oh, sure, we though for sure we’d do some sort of training before next (i.e. this) year. But we didn’t. We joked that climbing up and down the stairs each day surely counts for something (maybe?) and we do occasionally walk the 10 blocks or so to get downtown for shopping or dinner or a festival, so it’s not like we’re complete sloths. But train we did not.
And somehow I managed to block all but the first hill from my memory of last year’s walk, assuring our friends that decided to join us for this year’s walk that there was only the one, at the beginning, and it wasn’t too bad.
Yeah…
At least this year it didn’t rain!
The obligatory before and after shots–Notice a tiny bit less exuberance in the ‘after’..
On the up side: we made it through, once again, and beat last year’s time (our goal) and even made it in under an hour (bonus!). I huffed and puffed my way across the finish line at 59:48 and was just so very glad to be done (and, again, not the last people to cross, and by a better margin this year). We turned in our finish tickets, got the aforementioned t-shirts (and leather coasters, that was a nice surprise–last year the extra bit was a hat) and grabbed popsicles from the BlueBell truck before heading back home.
That’s where the down side comes in. At some point while we were standing there, enjoying the very cold and tasty lemonade popsicles, my right foot staged a major protest. And since we’d walked to the race, I had to limp my way home. *queue sad trombone*
They say there were 800 sign-ups, I’m thinking not all of them showed up because there were not 300 people after us, maybe more like 30!
I ended up spending the rest of the day like Tiny Tim on my one crutch so I didn’t have to put any weight on the ball of my foot where a large and angry blood blister had decided to form, and icing both the affected area and my ankle which was feeling a bit ill-used from walking funny for the first little while trying to accommodate the owie.
No good deed goes unpunished, right?
Thankfully, the worst of the pain and swelling went down by the end of the weekend and the crutch went back in the closet. Unfortunately my plans to wear heels to various meetings on Monday most certainly did not pan out, and walking in flats is all I can stand until this fully heals. But at least I wasn’t limping and didn’t have to explain to various people I was trying to impress with my business acumen (oh, yeah, the business plan is done, now–more on that in another post) how I’d managed to maim myself doing something so simple as walking!