By Andrew Lovdahl

Gargoyle staff reporter


Posted Sunday, May 13, 2007, The OG, features

The Twin Cities Twosome 5K run is the annual culminating event for Uni's physical education classes. “Students have been training in fitness all year for this race,” health teacher DeeDee Wright says. “It's amazing to watch our kids participate in this community event.” PE teacher Rebecca Murphy does most of the coordinating for Uni, working with students and with Human Kinetics, the main sponsor of the event. Gargoyle reporter Andrew Lovdahl was one of the 300 or so Uni students running Saturday morning, and he offers this first-person account. After some initial misgivings, he finds that the run wasn't so bad, after all.

AHH, THE 5K, also known as the Twin Cities Twosome. The day when we Uni students get an awesome T-shirt, a bright yellow number, and orders to wake up on Saturday at 7:30 a.m. so we can run our guts out for 3.1 miles. Yay.

I arrived at Crystal Lake Park in Urbana at 8:30 or so, and for a sleepy half hour I milled around the pavilion and lake house. At about 9:10 I joined the mini-exodus to the starting line. I wouldn't be running until Deren Kudeki finished, so I stood off to the side and milled some more.

A guy with a megaphone called out for Uni students to come over to the opposite side for whatever reason, so I wandered around the back of the dense crowd of runners. Some organizers started counting down from 10; the crowd halfheartedly chimed in toward the end, beginning a very orderly stampede.

The front of the pack came running past again after what seemed like only five minutes while the organizers shouted off their numbers. Soon, a constant stream of red-faced, sweat-drenched runners was being channeled through the starting zone to sporadic waves of applause.

As I saw Deren approaching up the hill, I hurried down to the starting zone again, pushed through the unbroken line of people stretching the length of the road, grabbed the little popsicle-stick/tongue depressor/baton and sped off.

I was at least happy to be moving, and by the first turn I was in cruise control. I had to trust that my pace would be brisk enough, because I would have no frame of reference until the first-mile marker.

I was optimistic after passing a few people who had started before me, but when the course turned off the street and into the park, my spirits fell a bit. This part of the track was always longer than I remembered it.

I think it was shortly after this that I ran past an ambulance ominously traveling in the opposite direction. I remember laughing in class when physical education teacher Rebecca “Merf” Murphy told us that emergency medical services were on hand, but suddenly it was a bit less amusing and a bit more frightening.

Soon, I found myself catching up to and overtaking Jeremy Kemball, who let me know what he thought of being passed by attacking me with his tongue depressor.

All right, a water station. I snatched a cup and tried to get some water down my throat, but quickly abandoned the idea and just doused my face with it. I thought it would shock me a bit and wake me up, but it wasn't as cold as I thought it was, so now I was wet, tired and temporarily blind, a vast improvement on just being tired.

The track mercifully dipped downhill for a while, and I finally passed the one-mile mark. I was hoping for about seven minutes, so I was a bit surprised to learn my time was … about 35 minutes. Oh. Right. I didn't think to listen for Deren's time, so I had only the vaguest idea of how well I was doing.

Fast-forward through the exchange zone, down Park Street, up Broadway, and back into the park. Apparently, the finish line was right behind the trees and across the lake to my left, so I could hear the applause and cheering that I knew I was still a mile shy of.

All the usual suspects were active by now — ragged breathing, weak knees, and my personal favorite, the taste of my last few meals returning to my mouth. But suddenly, I rounded a corner and there was the fork in the road. I didn't increase my pace just yet.

As I readied to kick it into fourth gear, I realized that I didn't quite know which way to turn. The confusion arose from the fact that the partners who ran first had their tags removed to the right, by the starting line, but in the past, when I had done solo runs, I always finished to the left by the lake house. Uh-oh. I ultimately broke off to the left and began sprinting.

Only 528 feet … hmm. The 100-yard dash is 300 feet, and I can do that in about 14 seconds … but then, that typically isn't after a 16,000-foot dash. Hey, I'm almost there.

Thoughts like this took my mind off things like, oh, say, the extreme pain that practically radiated from my joints and upper torso. As I bore into the home stretch, I looked down and saw a kid about half my height motoring along at exactly the same pace as me, despite the fact that my stride was about three times as long.

Finally I propelled myself past the big digital clock that read a nice, round 0:50:00, just behind this living incarnation of Roadrunner, and unsteadily came to a halt.

After emptying a bottle of water, vampirically draining the bitter juice from an orange segment, and convalescing in general, I learned that I had, in fact, improved over my old personal best by about a minute.

So, although it's not something that I look forward to every year, I find that the 5K isn't as hard as I tend to think it is in the days leading up to it. Besides, the weather was about as good as you could ask for, except for perhaps a freak wind current that followed the race course and let everyone ride along at 20 miles per hour.

RELATED

— Gargoyle staff blog: Run for your lives!

— External link: Twin Cities Twosome official site

— External link: News-Gazette photos from the race