A small and small-minded victory

Sometimes I am quite petty, it's true. And I had a great reminder of said pettiness while I was running last week's 8 miler. Here's the whole sordid story.

As I started up the long, winding hill that snakes from the beach to the top of the bluff at Golden Gardens, I saw a woman runner heading downhill toward me. Just before she passed me, she turned around and started running back up the hill. Oh great, I thought sarcastically, another opportunity for me to make peace with my slow pace.

Then I realized who the woman was: she goes to the same gym as me and I often see her in the free weight room. I don't know her name or anything about her because she never acknowledges my presence. That's fine, it's not like I chat with everyone in the weight room, but she seems to be quite friendly with many other folks. She works out with her boyfriend or husband, and he's been nice to me -- he says hi at the gym and when I see him out in the neighborhood. But her? Nothing doing. Even if she's standing right next to her boyfriend/husband when he says hello to me, she studiedly looks the other way. It definitely seems that she's taken a dislike to me.

I thought for a while that I was being paranoid so I tried looking at her, smiling and giving her a little "hey" wave when I saw her in the weight room, but her avoidance only intensified. She really couldn't have looked any harder in the other direction when I was attempting to be friendly. So I gave up and started actively disliking her in return (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em -- right?). Aside from being so weird and standoffish, she gave me a couple good reasons to thumb my figurative nose at her: she's always caressing and kissing her boyfriend/husband in the gym and that drives me crazy. Plus, her hair bugs me. Remember how I said I was petty at the beginning of this post?

Back to the run. Knowing that it was my gym nemesis plugging up the hill in front of me erased any potential for zen thoughts about accepting my slow pace. I stepped it up as much as I could -- but the hill was very steep and I was already quite sluggish from my cold. I just couldn't get in front of her. So I resolved to at least not get any farther behind.

Then, at the first curve, the most satisfying thing happened: she slowed down and started walking. Seeing that somehow gave me a big boost of extra juice -- I hoofed it the rest of the way up the hill without looking back, with a big fat mean-spirited grin on my face.

I have no idea if she ran or walked up the hill or not. For all I know, she may have been done with her run and heading back to her car when I saw her start walking. Regardless, I got to have a tiny moment of obnoxious victory at that first curve in the hill, and I relished it even while feeling like a really bad person. Hey, when you're as slow as I am, you've got to take your victories where you can get them.