I've always hated running just for running's sake. I can trace this hatred back to the first form of
organized sports I ever played. I have vivid memories of practicing with my 8-year-old AYSO soccer team - we ran from the sideline of the field, down a long hill to a pile of grass (seriously, it was just a huge stack of dead grass next to a poorly-seeded soccer field) and back up again. I was always dead last and couldn't breathe for the rest of practice.
Fast forward all the way to early high school years, when I was training for my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Part of the week-long blackbelt test included running 3 miles. I practiced for months to run the requisite number of laps around the parking lot. Most of the time, my stomach would make these weird noises after my training sessions, as if it wanted to collapse on itself. I believe I listened to a lot of Linkin Park and/or Blink-182 to get me through it.
Leap ahead again to 11th grade at Mercersburg. Tennis preseason, my first days as a student at the school, trying to make new friends. 3 laps around the soccer field in 90-degree weather. Let's just say that the entire team regretted my decision to have pasta with red sauce for lunch that day. Later that year, I tried lacrosse and broke my foot when we ran 7 miles over a mountain.
When I got to college and played Ultimate Frisbee, I mostly avoided the distance-running thing. Many of my teammates were doing it for conditioning, but I found the prospect of running laps utterly boring (not to mention possibly embarrassing, as I've been told both that I run like the Terminator and like a gazelle, neither of which were meant in a terribly positive light). Now, give me a disc to run after and I would chase it down with what some have referred to as "freakish" speed for someone of my height. I sort of love sprinting. But I could do that four or five times in a row before I started having flashbacks to that 11th grade tennis incident, because I wasn't conditioning myself for endurance. I considered it a few times but determined that the only way I could get motivated to run would be to have a very convincing recording of a buzzing chainsaw and someone growling "you can run, but you can't hide!" Teammates were on the lookout to snatch the headphones from my ears and tell me that everything was okay.
So with all of this bodily betrayal and public humiliation behind me, why am I suddenly jogging? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I spent my first year out of college doing next to nothing physically, and I suppose that scared me a little. Mike and I have determined to work together to stay (relatively) in shape, and jogging has always been the most obvious option for lack of gym membership. So I tried doing a mile a few weeks ago when Mike was out, just to see how much wind I'd be sucking when it was over. And it wasn't so bad... aside from the two guys who whistled at me as I was on the home stretch. Now Mike and I have jogged together two weeks in a row and are slowly increasing our distance. The prospect of seeing more interesting parts of the city on our jogs is a great incentive to build up endurance. So far we've done 1.2 miles max, hoping to hit 2.5 by the end of December.
And we're avoiding the pasta with red sauce on running days.
