The other day Steve read that in order to be a cop on the SBPD, one must complete a series of tests. One of these tests is an 880-yard run, which is 2 laps around a track, or half a mile. An officer must be able to run this distance within 4 minutes, 30 seconds.

Of course, since he is a runner, he finds this time to be laughably slow. I suppose it’s hard to have perspective, when you’d already be done running a whole mile before that cop crossed the finish line for half that distance.

To see how easy it would be for someone with absolutely no training to be able to complete this test, he asked me to run it. I, who haven’t run AT ALL in over a decade, would make a fine choice to test it out.

So last night I donned my sportiest outfit (my ONLY sporty outfit, as I don’t really do anything “sporty”) and headed to the track. He ran along with me, and as we began the run, I proclaimed “This is easy!” to which he shushed me and told me not to waste energy. I just laughed.

3/4th of the way into the first lap, I wasn’t laughing so much anymore. I could’ve stopped at the end of the first lap and been perfectly happy; why did there have to be ANOTHER lap?!

At about that point my shoe came untied, but it would’ve ruined the results to stop and fix it, so i ran (if you could call it running by that point) on. I started to fall behind Steve, despite the fact that he wasn’t going very fast at all. It wasn’t even that my body felt bad—my legs felt fine, I wasn’t dying of thirst—but I obviously have some cardiovascular issues.

When I saw the finish line, I couldn’t keep running, so I probably lost a second or two on that. My final time: 5 minutes and 20 seconds—50 seconds slower than the qualifying time. I guess now I know that I can’t outrun a cop. I suppose it also means that people like me couldn’t just walk off the street and meet the qualifying time—despite that fact that any person in respectable shape could run a mile faster than 9 minutes. In other words, I failed.

Now, I know that my time sucks, but keep in mind that I don’t exercise. And even though I could barely seem to get enough air, I completed the task. Not sure how big a fan I am of having my lungs hurt though. How on earth do people do marathons?!

Posted at 10:05 AM |

Thanks for stating the obvious!

2 | Posted by: Jennifer on January 13, 2005 @ 12:11 PM