My Hobby - Running

So this past Saturday was my first run in almost two weeks. My shoes had felt abandoned, my workout clothes were all clean and snug in the appropriate dresser drawer, finally Saturday the weather permitted and I ran.

When I had last run with this group I was a leader of the pack, it was really eye opening to see this week that my time off really showed. I was the slowest of this same group that I was leading two weeks before. That's the thing about running, you can lose so much of what you have been working for in a short amount of time. This has shown me why it is important to be consistent if I want to really do well in my upcoming half marathon. So I have begun this week with a new sense of commitment to running. Unfortunately the weather isn't exactly on my side, every day it seems to be either raining or hot as hell. So I've decided that a new approach has to be taken, I'm going to be joining a gym. Even though I hate treadmills beyond all belief it seems like it is the only solution to this problem. Wish me luck.

Anyways, this new development got me thinking about how this whole thing started. When I was trying to get in shape for Liz & Nolan's wedding I tried running around my neighborhood as soon as I got home to try and lose some weight. Even though I was barely able to run for more than a couple of blocks and I really didn't like it. It helped me lose a little weight before the wedding and I was pretty happy.

Then back in November or December Liz said that she wanted to run the competitive 5K at the Breast Cancer Walk in January and that she thought that I should join in. I had never had a desire to legitimately run in "competition" and I was kind of nervous about running that distance and embarrassing myself. But my competitiveness got the best of me and I ended up agreeing to run the race simply because I told her that I could beat her without any real training for it. She had gotten really into the whole training thing and had downloaded couch to 5K and thought that she was going to just rock it. I knew that I wasn't great but that I could probably at least keep up with her. Somehow this whole race just kind of kicked in my desire to run. That same weekend my co-worker was running a half marathon which at the time sounded like something impossible. I ended up finished my first 5K at around 32:30.

About a month later there was another 5K that my company was participating in. I asked that same co-worker who was running the half marathon if he would help me and try to pace me for this 5K to beat my previous time. And he took it very seriously, while I said that I wanted to try and get down to 31minutes, he took that to mean that we should go for 28 minutes. We ended up at 29:05 and I proceeded to throw up three times after crossing the finish line.

Since then we have managed to start a little running club at work. The first time that we ran I was told that we were going to run 5 miles which seemed impossible, I had never run that far before. But then somehow I managed to do it.

Now I'm training for a half marathon, 13.1 miles, something that six months ago seemed completely unreal. But this whole experiment into running as made me realize that I am really a focused person who can achieve whatever I set my mind to. It's just a matter of trying. Running has really been a great way for me to put other things in my life into perspective. It's been good.