This morning, in a clearly misguided moment, I signed up for a 5K race near a granite quarry about 20 minutes from home. I wasn’t feeling too confident. My left calf muscle was already staging a protest and my knee was eyeing the situation with suspicion.

Apparently the organizers shared my concern. They gave me bib number 619. That way, if I tumbled over face-down, it would still read 619 and they’d know who they were scraping off the ground.

I assumed we’d be running around the rim of the quarry. Maybe I’d get a nice view of the dramatic depth below. The first five minutes went fine. I wasn’t trying to prove anything, just trying to stay out of a level of pain that would force me to quit.

Then came the shocker. We kept going down. And down. And down. All the way to the bottom.

Now, as anyone who has ever taken a basic physics class knows, what goes down must come back up. So yes, we climbed all the way back out. Reminded me of The Grand Old Duke of York and his marching of his men up and down again!

I stopped to walk not once, not twice but three times just to remind my lungs what oxygen feels like.

But I finished it. All in one piece. The organizers were kind enough to give me a medal, presumably to commemorate my suffering.

I’ll take it.