The Truth Is Out There

I watched ^^^ this dude half-ass his way to a 13:05 5000 meters last night. I don’t know if I’m encouraged or discouraged. 5000 meters is generally around a track, while a 5k is generally a road race – same distance, different courses. That’s just a point of clarification for the track jargon. The commentators spent the whole thirteen minutes talking about how slow the pace was, and that most of the guys running had just started speed work for this season. What the hell? I’ve run sub twenty-seven minutes at this distance twice in my life, and both times I nearly died. I also didn’t have to deal with the regular curves that come up on a track every hundred yards or so. These guys were running more than twice as fast as me while they work themselves back into real race shape. I can run 400 meters at that pace, but I can’t run 800. Watching these guys run makes me wonder if we’re the same species. The guy in the picture is Kenenisa Bekele. He’s from Ethiopia. He holds the world records at 5000 and 10000 meters. As I’m looking up stuff about distance running records, the species joke a few sentences back is becoming less and less of a joke. His 5000 meter (12:37.35) record is 21 seconds faster than the American record (12:58.21). So this guy finished while the fastest American ever, Bob Kennedy, would have barely been more than half way through his last lap. There have been exactly three non-Africans in the history of the world to run a sub thirteen minute 5000 meters. Battlestar Galactica ended with the Cylon/human hybrid baby being Mitochondrial Eve, who lived and died in, wait for it, Ethiopia. Now I’m just getting freaked out. I started this post as a quasi-self-motivational thing to get me to train harder, but now I’m starting to think the writers on BSG know something and this Bekele character is a frackin’ toaster. This is going to haunt me for a while.