Today was the Truffle Shuffle, an annual Eugene run sponsored by a local chocolatier. You run four miles and get a big chocolate truffle. Since (a) that’s one mile less than the run I was supposed to do this weekend and (b) a big chocolate truffle was involved, I signed up.

Eugene is currently in the midst of fake spring, the two weeks in February when the sky clears, the rain disappears, and the temperature rises. Consequently I decided to run in a skirt, specifically a skirt my mom made me in junior high that is blue with little palm-treed tropical islands printed on it. I pulled on this, my Team in Training jersey, and my speedy new sneaks and met up with Emilee, another TnT runner who is also the roommate of my friend Julie. We biked over to the park and found the registration tent, where we got big paper numbers to pin to our stomachs. I was 1462. My first big paper number ever.

We headed up to the starting line, where runners from the earlier two mile race were just coming in. We cheered and stretched and marveled that we were doing the long race of the day. As start time neared we ran into Aaron, another TnTer, and the three of us made our way to the start.

The starting line was more of a starting mob. The crowd numbered in the hundreds. Eugene is also known as Tracktown – it was home to Prefontaine and is about to host the Olympic time trials – and the crowd had its fair share of hard core. It also, however, had teenagers in skater clothes and seniors with sweatbands. We milled around chatting until a loud crack shattered the air. After about five seconds we realized that it was probably some sort of starting gun. After another ten seconds the crowd in front of us began moving.

The mob spread out quickly and we settled into our slow, steady pace. Coach Phil had been clear that even when running “short” distances like four miles we were to stick to conversation pace. For us this turned out to be 10-minute miles. For those of you new to running, that’s pretty fuckin slow. As a frame of reference, there are people who run 4-minute miles. Not that they do it for a whole marathon, but even so… people finish marathons in just over two hours. For those of you new to math, if we had maintained those 10-minute miles for another 22 miles – to total the length of a marathon – said marathon would have taken us 262 minutes to complete. That’s almost four and a half hours. Four and a half terrible, terrible hours.

Not that this mere forty minutes left me begging for more. Between feeling overheated in the sixty-degree weather and my first awkward, non-hydrating attempt at drinking-while-running, these four miles left me feeling unfit and graceless as ever. Fortunately there were good parts: all of mile two had an intuitive rhythm, where I just looked straight ahead and let my body run; the finish felt energizing and endorphiny. But the rest… ugh. This is going to get better, right?