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The human body is truly a wondrous thing. It’s like a state-of-the-art battery that’s recharged simply by providing nourishment and rest. With proper care, you can make it stronger by depleting and recharging it regularly. Experts agree that it actually gets better with each rigorous use.

Usually.

But I gotta tell ya’, we’re gonna have to go looking through all the remote controls and flashlights to find a new Stitchy battery because I. Am. Beat.

Last week, my best girl-friend, Charlene, and I partook in not one, but two 5K-ish road races. The first one was on Thursday evening in downtown Boston. It was the annual JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge. The course went from the Boston Common to Kenmore Square and back. It was a gorgeous night, the weather couldn’t have been better. I remember walking that route all the time when I first landed in Boston for school. Even though Kenmore Square has changed a lot, it felt like it was just yesterday. In actuality, it’s been about 6,875 yesterdays. !!‚  Anyway, my company gave out three prizes for the top three finishers running for our team and guess what? I won third place! Can you believe it? Wait, you can’t? Well, what if I told you that only three people from our company showed up to participate? Ah, makes much more sense now, right? I kind of fell off my workout bandwagon and wasn’t able to run even half the time, at one point a guy in a motorized wheelchair passed us. We overtook him later, but it wasn’t easy. I’m glad I participated, though. It was good to get out there and read all those corporate t-shirts. One said “We’re running our assets off!” It really was like a t-shirt competition. And now I have 25 bucks to spend at Best Buy!

And then Saturday morning, we did the Chelsea River Revel 5k. It started at 10:30 and was already 90 degrees by then. If you read the description of the course here, you’ll notice the words “up” and “hill” in close proximity. Twice. And‚ not a single mention of “shade”. So, out of about 55 runners, I came in dead last. Charlene beat me by half a second. Seriously, she was recorded at .5 seconds faster than me. It kind of made me wish I had pushed myself more at the Corporate Challenge because the weather had been so good. This was just torturous. And for the last 15 minutes or so, we were the ones the police had to follow on their motorcycles. Towards the end, they started to encourage us, but I can only assume it was because their nether regions had been cooking on a high heat for about 40 minutes and they just wanted us to hurry the hell up so they could pull their roasted loins off their bikes. Afterwards, there was a little fair on the Meridian Street bridge and we treated ourselves to homemade empanadas, which are just like a spinach salad, except they’re fried pastry dough filled with spicy meat or tangy cheese. We had one of each because we decided we had earned them.

In the end, it took about 43 minutes for the Chelsea race (3.1 miles)‚ and maybe 50 for the Boston one (3.5 miles). About a 15 minute mile, which is exactly what we thought we’d do. I’ll definitely do others and plan to keep working on my mad jogging skillz. But I need a couple of days to be able to walk straight first.

But for now, I need to go to sleep.

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