How to get owned in a 5K

Are you tired of always crossing the finish line first? Does the thought of winning another gold medal/blue ribbon/gift card/souvenir mug/pair of men’s running socks make you want to light your racing flats on fire and scratch out the Prefontaine quote you so meticulously stenciled above your headboard? Do you need a swift reality check to cool your ego and crush that ridiculous pipe dream of “going pro?” If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, then you need to lose a race by an embarrassingly large margin—and fast! Based on my own experience racing a 5K in my hometown last weekend, I compiled the following step-by-step guide for running your way to a fantastically disappointing runner-up finish. Now, get out there and lose like a winner!

1. Train exclusively:

• on flat concrete paths
• at low elevation
• in temperatures above 100 degrees (that way, you’ll never go faster than 7-minute mile pace) 

2. Choose a race course that:

• is mainly dirt/gravel
• features lots of hills
• is located in a cool mountain climate

3. To promote maximum muscle tightness, select an event at least 1,000 miles away, book your flight for the night before, and put in a full eight-hour workday before boarding the plane.

4. When selecting your seat assignment, make sure you are surrounded by a half dozen screaming children whose parents are most likely deaf from years of auditory abuse—at least judging from their disinterest in controlling the volume of their unruly spawn.

5. Do not sleep.

6. To increase the chances of a major flight delay, travel as late in the day as possible.

7. Sit on the tarmac for two hours while engineers troubleshoot a “mechanical problem.” Let your paranoid inner voice convince you that this is code for “imminent engine failure,” thus signaling your adrenal gland to release of a healthy dose of cortisol into your blood stream.

8. Avoid using that tiny, despicable excuse for a lavatory by staying as dehydrated as possible.

9. During your layover, find the greasiest, most flavorless chicken sandwich you’ve ever spent $15 on. Eat all of it.

10. Arrive at your destination well after midnight. Do not go to bed until 2 a.m.

11. Toss and turn for five hours. Wake up unrefreshed and unprepared to compete.

12. Arrive at the race site 15 minutes before the scheduled start, allowing yourself just enough time to register, do three ominously laborious warm-up strides, and seriously regret your decision to show up.

13. Gasp and heave pathetically as you strain to keep up with the teenage girl who is kicking your ass.

14. Ignore the resulting chest pains.

15. Lumber across the finish line nearly 45 seconds after the first-place finisher. Wave awkwardly when the race emcee announces you as a “former star.”

Mission accomplished.

The perfect predicament

My college coach always taught her athletes to focus on the positive qualities of each racing experience. In her eyes, a bad race was, if nothing else, a valuable learning opportunity. Over the years, this approach to race evaluation has yielded many important lessons: Fudging your entry time is not always a good idea. Pop-Tarts are not an appropriate pre-race meal. Official lap-counters cannot always be trusted.

A couple of weeks ago, I raced a 5K in Arizona and learned that there is, in fact, such thing as a “perfect” race—one that does not require any sort of post-race effort to identify the “positives,” because the entire affair is, from start to finish, one big, sweaty bundle of positivity.

Last weekend, exactly seven days after my perfect 5K, I decided to push my luck by entering another race. Considering that the second race occurred in Montana and was double the distance of the first one, I’m not really sure what I was thinking; I can only surmise that the thin mountain air compromised my brain function, severely impairing my ability to think logically. I mean, honestly, what are the chances of hitting the jackpot two weekends in a row?

“Slim to none,” you might say.

Somewhere between the freezing temperatures, icy wind, high altitude and aggressively long hills, “slim” got thrown out the frost-covered window. Before I even finished my warm-up, I knew there was exactly “none” chance of repeating the flawless race experience I had achieved just one week prior.

And…I was right. I know, I know, this story would be so much cooler if I told you that through the power of positive thinking and sheer determination, I was able to overcome the odds and pull out another perfect race in spite of decidedly imperfect conditions—or, at the very least, that I found five dollars. But alas, unlike Mary Cain—who can expect a perfect race pretty much every time she toes a starting line—I am human. (And in this economy, people are much more careful with their five-dollar bills.)

The problem, I have realized, is that once you find perfection, it is very difficult to replicate. Now that I know what perfect is, no other race will ever measure up. This is at once immensely satisfying and immensely depressing—like getting a surprise upgrade to business class only to have every subsequent flight for the rest of your life ruined by the memory of fully reclining seats, excess legroom and complimentary cocktails.

Similarly, even though I ended up winning the 10K outright by nearly six minutes, I did not feel entirely fulfilled. There was that lingering feeling that it could have been better—if it had been warmer, if the wind had been calmer, if the course had been flatter, if I’d had more competition, blah, blah, blah…

Not to mention that my prize as the overall female winner was a pair of size 9.5-11 athletic socks. But hey, let’s focus on the positive: I’m sure they’ll come in handy somewhere down the road—if I unexpectedly turn into an exceptionally large man, for example.

And now, because I just couldn’t resist, here is a crude artistic rendering of myself as an exceptionally large man:

The real Brooke Hogan

TSA: take two

As most of my loyal readers are well aware, I have a small beef with TSA. Actually, it's kind of a big beef. Like a 40-ounce porterhouse steak-sized beef. Whenever something goes wrong for me during a trip that involves air travel, I almost always find a way to blame it on the Transportation Security Administration. (And if that doesn’t work, I just blame George Bush like everyone else.)

Last weekend, I had the great fortune of traveling to Phoenix to visit my best pal from my college running days. (Who, by the way, is one of the loyal readers I’m talking about.)

From the moment I arrived at the airport, I couldn’t stop smiling. I could barely contain my excitement about (a) seeing my friend, and (b) standing (and running!) outside without seeing my breath.

I was in such a good mood that the hassles of going through the airport security line didn’t even faze me. I happily removed my coat, sweater, scarf, shoes, belt and hair pins. I grinned as I passed through the metal detector without a hitch. I think I might have even winked at one of the agents.

But when I got to the other side of the X-ray machine, I was troubled to find that my bag was not waiting for me. I was even more troubled when I saw an agent walking toward me with my bag. Then came the dreaded, “Miss, is this your bag?”

Me: [My mood instantly shifting from happy-go-lucky to visibly perturbed.] Yes.

TSA-hole: [In the dry, unsympathetic tone typical of TSA employees] Did you check a bag, or have you considered checking a bag?

Me: [Starting to get annoyed] No. It’s a total rip-off.

TSA-hole: [Ruining my immaculate packing job as he rummages through my personal belongings and pulls out every bottled/jarred/tubed product he can find.] Well, you might want to think about it, because I can’t let you through with any liquid containers larger than three ounces.

Me: [Now becoming legitimately pissed off] Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. This little airline scheme doesn't fool me for a minute. I know I could buy a whole new set of toiletries for what it would cost to check this bag.

TSA-hole: [Holding out my brand-new bottle of styling mousse in a taunting fashion] Then I’m afraid I’m going to have to dispose of this.

Me: [Contorting my face into the most menacing scowl I can muster, as I’m not very practiced in the art of menacing scowls] Fine. Are we done here?

TSA-hole: [In a fake-nice voice with a fake-nice smile] Uh-huh. Have a great flight.

I wanted to respond with something like, “Thanks. I'll think of this as a charitable donation, since you are clearly in need of basic hair products.” Instead, I pulled my things off of the table, smiled sarcastically and stomped away in my socks because I couldn’t stand to be in this loser’s immediate vicinity for another second.

When I arrived in Phoenix, I told my friend that I needed to make an emergency stop at Walgreens to purchase hair gel so that I wouldn’t look like Paula Abdul circa 1987 all weekend.

We got to talking about airport security, and she made the excellent point that when we were traveling to track meets with our college team, everyone was allowed to carry on their equipment—throwing implements, vice grips, spikes, etc.

The more we talked about it, the more I realized how insanely ridiculous it was that I made it through security on multiple occasions with these:

(Because only legitimate athletes would try to carry an item with a dozen needle-sharp metal objects protruding from its surface onto an airplane.)

Which are strikingly similar to this:

(Photo courtesy of renblades.com)

And are capable of this:

(Photo by Shawn Price/stanfordalumni.org)

But heaven forbid you try to bring this:

(Because tamed flyaways and defined curls are telltale characteristics of violent terrorists.)

Which is capable of that:

(Photo courtesy of marissa elkind/Flickr)

I guess TSA is just one more thing about the federal government that I’ll never understand.

TSA-holes

Well, I knew that knocking on wood wasn’t going to last forever. Eventually, my knuckles would get sore. Or I would get injured.

I am happy to report that all of my hand joints are in tip-top condition. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for my left Achilles tendon.

What really grinds my gears is that I’m pretty sure I didn’t hurt it running. It’s been almost a year since my college career—a.k.a. five years of walking a string-thin tightrope between peak fitness and serious injury—went off the air, and I have definitely dialed back both the quantity and quality of my mileage.

The last few weeks have been particularly jog-tastic, as I find it difficult to coax my legs into moving quickly when it’s dark and 21 degrees outside. (For real ya’ll—could I get some daylight savings up in here?)

So, as a mature, responsible adult who appreciates the values of character and integrity, I have decided to pawn the blame off on someone else. And that someone is TSA.

That’s right, folks—the Transportation Security Administration has it out for fit, active individuals like you and me.

Imagine the following scenario: You’re in line at airport security. You have all of your liquids organized and safely zipped inside of a one-quart plastic bag. You have your laptop out of its case and ready for examination. You even remembered to wear pants that don’t require a belt, just to speed up the process so you can hurry up and wait in line some more.

Of course, airports are big, and you anticipated having to walk a fair distance once you arrive at your destination. So in the interest of comfort, you wore your running shoes. Big mistake.

Now you’re jamming up the line as you scramble to untie your double-knotted laces. The man behind you sighs loudly in an attempt to inform you of the inconvenience you have caused him, as it has now been close to 30 seconds since he removed his Denver Broncos Crocs, and he still hasn’t gone through the metal detector thingy yet.

The TSA agent rolls his eyes at you as you carefully place your prized pair of Asics Cumulus on the belt. When you collect your footwear and the rest of your possessions on the other side of the Wand Squad, you cause yet another logjam as you bend over to put your shoes back on and re-tie the laces. You’re pretty sure Croc guy gave you the finger as he huffed off to the C gates with his backpack on wheels.

And to think, all of this could have been avoided by wearing a simpler—albeit less supportive—pair of shoes.

So guess what? That’s what I did. I wore a pair of flimsy canvas flats through the entire Las Vegas airport. Then I wore them through a giant Las Vegas shopping mall. And when I cruised up and down the strip with the rest of the drunken tourists? Yep, I wore them then too.

But Brooke—you might ask—why didn’t you just wear your running shoes once you got to Vegas?

Because I’m already a pasty-ass Montanan who has no business wearing shorts in a town full of fake tans and, well, other fake things. So I wasn’t about to make myself even more of an aesthetic misfit by tromping around in a pair of dirty sneakers.

Well, then why didn’t you just pack another pair of cuter, more supportive shoes?

Because I had to cram everything I wanted to take into a tiny carry-on bag, since I’m cheap and I refused to pay $40 to have the airlines accidentally fly my bag to India (again). Supportive shoes tend to be more bulky, which is why they didn’t make the cut.

So, by way of deductive reasoning, airport security is 100 percent responsible for the stinging pain I feel at the base of my heel bone every time something—including the back of a shoe—touches it.

Are you happy now, TSA? You got your way—now I can’t wear any shoes with straps, buckles or laces. I am confined to clogs and Ugg boots, which severely limits my workout options (last time I checked, my gym didn’t offer any Irish clogging classes).

I’m stuck in the pool until further notice, which, among other things, means I will have bad hair until further notice. Stand by.