In college, my competitive outlet was running. I trained for months and months, logging thousands of miles for just a couple critical races. I remember so vividly the feeling of being a half mile from the finish of regionals in 2006 and seeing my coach, JD shouting “you’re 27th, 25th is right up there, GET HIM!” (top 25 had a shot at making nationals individually, and was my personal goal all season long). My whole season -- in retrospect, my whole career -- had come down to that last half mile, and without even making a conscious decision about what to do, I just starting sprinting. I passed one guy, rounded the final turn and passed another. As I strained toward the finish, I’ve been told the expression on my face made it look like someone was performing a lung transplant on me mid stride. I don’t remember feeling any pain, but I think I’d reached the rare euphoria just beyond agony and just before collapsing altogether. I finished 25th, and the rest is history (though a really obscure appendix in the history books that only anyone directly connected to our team knows about). But the point is that racing and running my ass off to try to beat people who had more natural talent than me was all I needed to satisfy that competitive voice inside me.
I have no desire to run competitively any more, possibly ever again. Now I’m one of those idiots who cares way too much about the success and failures of millionaire athletes who I’ve never met. Professional sports seem to matter so much more when you don’t have your own races to worry and competitions to train for. It’s like I’m that 11 year old kid again, inconsolably crying after the Broncos got upset in the 1996 divisional round of the AFC playoffs by the Jaguars; or running around the house jubilantly when Elway finally lifted the Lombardi trophy a year later. I need a competitive outlet. When I was running, that was great, and probably a healthier way to get my fix. But now I have Tim Tebow and my Denver Broncos.
What happened last night during the Denver-Pittsburgh game was amazing. I don’t care what teams you root for or how you feel about hyper-religious quarterbacks who spend more time praying than Tiger Woods spent banging hot blondes from 2006 to 2009. That game was in the top handful of playoff games in the last decade. On the first play of overtime, lining up like they were going to run the ball, sending a man in motion like they were going to run the ball, then faking a handoff like they were going to run the ball, all in order to set up Demaryius Thomas in man-to-man coverage against Ike Taylor who he’d been burning all night. It was confirmation that this was what Tebow’d been planning all along, a dramatic finish to a home playoff game that came impossibly close to never even happening. And Tebow played phenomenally nearly the entire game. He broke Elway’s Bronco record for passing yards in a playoff game. He made the “best passing defense in the league” look like a team crippled by injuries and missing several of its best players -- oh wait, I guess that’s sort of what they were... but still.
Some people have pointed to Tebow’s completion percentage as an obvious blemish on an otherwise Ashton Kutcher-esque face. That’s partially true, but keep in mind that a handful of those incompletions came on plays that would have been sacks, if not for Tebow escaping from pressure and throwing the ball away (sometimes purposefully, other times missing an open receiver along the sideline). It was the best game of his career, in the most important game of his career, and that’s exactly the type of performance I want in a quarterback. I never jumped off the bandwagon, but I’ll admit, I expected to die in a fiery crash weeks ago.
The game was a lot more satisfying than my attempts at running this week. Luke dragged me through 5.4 miles on Sunday morning and spent the lion’s share of the time trying to talk me into doing an iron-man with him. I don’t think he quite understands the only reason I’m running again is to feel a little less worthless and to avoid getting fat. Well, that and so I can have a place to post my long-winded odes to Tim Tebow. We averaged something like 6:30 pace for the run which was way faster than I’d been running on my own. The plus side to running, what was for me, a tempo run is that it gets the run over with a lot sooner. The down side is that it hurts to walk down stairs now. Holy crap, am I out of shape; embarrassing. This morning I logged my 3.16 mile loop, which I realized was fitting given Tebow’s 316 passing yards and the new “Tebow 3:16” meme that’s spreading through the internets. If this was a movie, we’d be calling it wildly unrealistic.
This week’s mileage so far:
Sunday: 5.4
Monday: Tebow 3.16
If you don’t count New Years Day, when I was too busy fighting a hangover and watching football to go running, I’m actually on pace for my 1,380 figure. Keep in mind, I’m going to be taking two weeks off to travel around Southeast Asia, so I’m not going to stay on pace right now. But jumping right into almost 30 miles per week is decent for a candy-ass who hasn’t run more than 3 days in a row for the last five years.
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