Running a race? Me? Really? Don't be ridiculous.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not fast. I never have been. I've come to terms with the fact that I never will be. As someone who has watched more than his fair share of sports both professionally and for fun, I know that athleticism is a physical characteristic that never leaves you. If you have it, you have it. And ladies and gentlemen, I don't have it.

That's fine. I've accepted my lack of velocity ever since I "ran" a mile for gym class at age 10 and clocked in at a robust 17:18. Granted, this is mostly due to the fact that I walked the entire thing with my friend Matt, but over the 17 years that have passed since I have not shown the predilection nor the aptitude for learning how to run one faster than that. And that's ok.

Of course, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I had, in fact, gotten faster. In high school when I "played" football -- there's a reason "played" is in quotes -- I ran a timed mile in 8:30, though I did weigh significantly more at the time. While I didn't time myself at any point, I did begin to run on a regular basis in college, sometimes as many as seven days a week, usually at a fair brisk pace and never indoors. Given that I went to school near Chicago, this was not a smart idea for approximately 11.5 months out of the year.

If you'd ever like to know what lake-effect snow in your face feels like in -20-degree weather, I'm happy to tell you. It isn't good.

But I never ran races. Never. I was not one of those people who trained for road races and became obsessed with collecting bibs, breaking their PRs or measuring my splits. In fact, I had never run a race before in my entire life, and while the idea of running a marathon was always an athletic achievement I had considered striving for, it's become extremely clear to me over the years that I'm far more interested in telling people I ran a marathon after the fact than I am in actually doing it. After all, why would I want to duplicate a feat that killed the first person to ever accomplish it? Seems somewhat counterintuitive when applied to my general goal of staying alive.

So yeah, even though I've spent 45 minutes every day on the elliptical for the past five months and I've been running roughly three miles a day outside on and off for 10 years now, I had never, not once, ever actually run a road race, and I had no real plans to change that. Of course, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my weight and the ensuing pounding on my knees it was likely to cause didn't deter me somewhat.

However, I'm a little more svelte these days as some of you might have noticed. Just this past Friday I had manged to cut my weight down to a new low of 182.2 pounds, a mere seven pounds away from the mythical Quesarito. So that means less pounding, fewer achy joints and maybe a little better endurance. All of this factored in when a friend recently asked me to run a 5K to raise money for pancreatic cancer research after her father passed away from the disease six months ago.

And so it was that on Saturday morning I fought every fiber of my being and woke up at 7:45, consumed some valuable carbohydrates at the local bagel shop and slowly made my way to Riverside Park for my first ever 5K.

There comes a point in the weight loss process when your efforts, if successful, start to have a real, tangible impact. I have already crossed some of those bridges, noticing that my face is thinner or that pants I couldn't wear three years ago suddenly fit perfectly well. But on Saturday morning, there were more of those than I had encountered before.

My ankles and knees didn't feel the same pain they had when I first returned to running every day back in December, and the difference between my endurance now as opposed to then isn't even close. For most of my life I had assumed heavy breathing was a direct impact of running; it was inseparable and unavoidable. For most of the past six months I hadn't quite noticed a difference because I assumed running on the elliptical had prevented my breath from becoming labored because it simply wasn't as intense of a workout. But as I ran the course -- which had one bitch of a hill just a few hundred yards after the start -- I noticed that for whatever crazy reason, I wasn't breathing heavily. At all. In fact, as I spent the first two miles using my friend Nicole as a pacer I didn't even feel winded.

To say this was bizarre for me would be a dramatic understatement.

This was all the stranger considering I was not exactly ideally prepared for the run. Sure I have been exercising regularly over the past several months and so my body is about as in shape as its ever been, but I also ran this race on roughly six hours of sleep, with two bagels in my stomach eaten far to close to the start time to provide me any tangible benefit as far as glucose is concerned and -- this is easily the dumbest part of the whole operation -- having not drunken any water that morning.

And yet I felt fine. Not only did I feel fine, but after two miles of pacing behind Nicole I decided to push as fast as I could for the final mile (though I might have waited longer to do this if I realize a whole mile was left) and not only did I finish second among our group of friends, but of 990 people who ran the race, I finished a respectable 236th overall at 27:09, good for a mile pace of 8:45. My goal, determined over a beer the night before at a birthday dinner, was 27 minutes, so I suppose in that sense I fell short, but I somehow managed to finish 58th out of 145 males in the 25-to-29 age range, while placing 159th among all men that ran the race. All things considered, this isn't half bad for someone who was ill-prepared and had never run a road race before, and considering this came just days after a large African man that looked like he was a college linebacker approached me in the gym for workout tips (this was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life for several reasons) it's safe to say I'm not quite as in bad shape as I used to be. I assume this must all be a product of wearing my totally insane new customized Reeboks.

That's logic that would make Mars Blackmon proud.

So in the end, I never saw myself running an organized race, and I'm not sure I see myself running a marathon ever, though this nifty running calendar says I could do it in about 4:24:33. But I do know I can run for 3.1 miles without stopping. And according to my friend who organized our group I am ridiculously fast, so it must be true. With that kind of lasting praise I'm tempted to retire from all organized racing on a high note, but now I'm also mulling a 10K in two weeks, so that temptation probably won't be taking.

Whatever happens though, I refuse to become a person who is obsessed with the specifics and nuances of their running and long-distance race training. I will not become someone who posts pictures of their newly acquired bibs, publicly discusses race splits or talks about how my feet are responding to a new type of shoe that causes me to heel strike and pronate rather than supinate.

And I promised to do just that as soon as I beat my new PR.

CROWD-SOURCED WEIGHT LOSS PLAN DAY 150!

Days until sister's wedding: 60
Target weight: 175
Starting weight: 219
Weight today: 184.6