My lungs are bleeding!

Holy shit, batman.

I did a practice run on the PARE test on tuesday night. I can still feel it in my lungs two days later. Oh my FREAKING god is that ever hard on the body.

The good news is I got an unofficial time of 4:09, comfortably within the limit of 4:45 for new recruits. That is also good considering I did it with the full Constable weights instead of the lighter recruit weights. I will have to shave 10 seconds off my time in order to graduate from Depot but then, my goal is to be at 3:45 before I even go to Regina.

I did this unofficial run to test myself and my preparations thus far, so I could tune up my training before I have to complete the test for real. The testing staff at the college thought I was nuts for doing it voluntarily. I think they're right. So far my training has been a success: 9 years ago (when I applied last time) I could taste blood every time I exhaled for 4 days afterwards. So far I have not tated blood, but it does feel like there is a lot of fluid in my lungs. I didn't do any cardio this morning at the gym because of that beyond a quick 5 minute warmup (that I normally pace myself out to 6 minutes for when I run) but I will have to run tomorrow morning.

A summary of what I learned from this:
a) run more stairs
b) run more intervals
c) pick up the intensity of my Continuous Pace training

A few technique points that were pointed out to me as well is to take the stairs 2 or 3 at a time, to shave off as much as 20 or 30 seconds from my time, vice hitting every stair going up and down. I also need to be more careful during the push/pull stage to avoid losing any time to penalties.

In other news: It has now been 3 1/2 weeks since I wrote the exam. Still no results. Why can't the results come any faster???