Day 47: "Love's Labour's Lost" (2009)

My sincere apologies to the great William S. Shakespeare. I've adapted a little bit of his prose to suit my situation as I feel myself losing ground with resistance to running. Shakespeare's original words were written in the mid-1590s and then first published in 1598.

"Love's Labour's Lost" (2009)
Adieu, valour!
Rust rapier!
Be still, day job and drum!
For your manager is in love with running and writing; yea, she loveth.
Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme and road, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet and mile.
Devise, wit; write, pen;
Devise, agility: move, shoe;
...for I am for whole volumes in folio as this story unfolds;
...and miles in motion as the treadmill goes;
...or so I wish it to be that nothing should stop me.
Expand, capillaries!
Limber limbs!
Even now, I arrive, one day at a time, to the Finish Line!

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The following is an update and correction of VO2 Max results as reported yesterday.
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I used an online calculator to measure my VO2 Max score yesterday and have never been quite so excited to find out I ranked "Average" at something! I'd really been expecting the worst; but hallelujah, 46 days of jogging and I'd already netted measurable effects. I celebrated briefly before doubts began to creep in. Was that online test accurate? It had only incorporated the length of time my 1.5 mile run had taken. What about other factors, like my gender, or height or weight?

When I returned home from Philly tonight I went through my new Runner's World book called GETTING STARTED and found a very elaborate mathematical calculation that took into account gender and weight and decided to re-do the results. I anxiously opened the calculator function on my laptop. I had to do the math about four times to be sure, but the news wasn't good. In fact, my VO2 Max is 29.1400292, which, according to the book's accompanying table, placed me in about the 25th percentile for women, on the cusp of Below Average and... WELL BELOW AVERAGE! "If your initial VO2 is below average, don't be disheartened:" the book said, "Running will certainly improve it." I'll say! Nowhere to go but up! All I keep thinking about now is how bad my VO2 must have been when I started all this... I'd known I was in bad shape but I hadn't realized I'd sunk that low.

From time to time, I worry about the possibility that in chasing a laugh, I might employ a touch too much hyperbole. Mild exaggeration is a normal comedic device, and by now I'm sure you expect it to some degree from me, but I also want to make sure that when I give you the cold hard facts about where I'm at in this training process, you can trust that I'm telling you how it really is. So in important moments I will make an effort to let you know that the data points I'm offering are pure.

This is one of those moments and I feel quite vulnerable about it. I might have been proud yesterday of being "Average," but today I'm scared and alarmed that, even after all I've done between November 1st and today, I am still only achieving "Well Below Average" results. No wonder I don't feel like I'm getting enough oxygen when I'm running! I am not. My muscles are starving.

So much work to be done. Dreams of running the Half Marathon on March 21, 2010, seem unrealistic in this moment. I don't want to be a doubter, but I also don't want to set myself up for major disappointment, or injury. I hope very much that over the next few months I can continue to train intensively and will see evidence of improvement through a higher VO2 Max score.