10 Years Later - Running, Crawling...Whatever It Takes
I was a couch potato as a child. Wait, I guess that's not exactly true. I played outside a lot, but I was never involved in sports or anything athletic. I don't know why children's worlds often break down into "the arts" versus "sports," but that does seems to be the way things went, at least when I was a child. I, and my family, were firmly planted in the arts. I took piano, oboe, and voice lessons at one time or another from age 5 through my teen years. I was in several music ensembles in school, several community ensembles, and when I was in high school I stated traveling 132 miles each way for voice lessons.
This is not to say that I never ventured into the world of sport and exercise as a child. I was in track for one season when I was in the seventh grade and I went to one softball practice when I was 9. I also took swimming lessons here and there and swam weekly in the summers at my grandparents' camp on Echo Lake in Mount Vernon, ME. That was it. The message was always clear to me. Despite my wishes to be burly, I was not an athletic person.
I had tried running a bit when I was in college and our first black eventually Lab got me walking every day. In February or March, 2004 I tried running as part of a weight loss regime. As I have written before, that weight has come and gone multiple times since, but the running stuck. In fact, in the blink of an eye, 10 years has managed to pass since I took on running on the streets in Saco in my very unfashionable yellow sweatpants. Since that time I have run or exercised 5-7 days a week...for 10 years.
Ten years.
How did that happen? I still think of myself as someone who is not very active, a wanna-be amateur athlete. I guess that first impressions, even of oneself, can be hard to break.
So, other than lots of running injuries and a low pulse rate, where has this gotten me in life? Certainly I must have learned something through this process. You can't do something close to every day for 10 years and learn nothing! So, here's what I've learned or gained.
This is not to say that I never ventured into the world of sport and exercise as a child. I was in track for one season when I was in the seventh grade and I went to one softball practice when I was 9. I also took swimming lessons here and there and swam weekly in the summers at my grandparents' camp on Echo Lake in Mount Vernon, ME. That was it. The message was always clear to me. Despite my wishes to be burly, I was not an athletic person.
I had tried running a bit when I was in college and our first black eventually Lab got me walking every day. In February or March, 2004 I tried running as part of a weight loss regime. As I have written before, that weight has come and gone multiple times since, but the running stuck. In fact, in the blink of an eye, 10 years has managed to pass since I took on running on the streets in Saco in my very unfashionable yellow sweatpants. Since that time I have run or exercised 5-7 days a week...for 10 years.
Ten years.
How did that happen? I still think of myself as someone who is not very active, a wanna-be amateur athlete. I guess that first impressions, even of oneself, can be hard to break.
So, other than lots of running injuries and a low pulse rate, where has this gotten me in life? Certainly I must have learned something through this process. You can't do something close to every day for 10 years and learn nothing! So, here's what I've learned or gained.
- In the world of exercise, do what you like. If you don't like running, don't do it. If you don't like cycling, don't do it. Find something that works for you and do it, even if that changes every so often.
- Patience is a virtue. I have nursed my running injuries with ice, tape and more rest than I would ever want. During that time I would ride a stationary bicycle, use the elliptical machine, swim, lift weights, and on and on...just waiting to be healed enough to run again. There's a good chance that my increase is patience over the past 10 years is related to normal maturation, but there's as good of a chance that it is also related to waiting through all of those set backs.
- Running and exercise give me permission to eat more chocolate. There, I said it.
- First loves can return again and again. I go through stages when I don't particularly like running, but since it's what I do (and I like to consume a lot of chocolate), I just keep at it, even on the days when I dislike it. In fact, there have been a few years when in a row when I disliked running the majority of the time...even when I was training for marathons. Even then though, no matter how I feel at the beginning of a run, I am always glad that I ran when it's over. Lately, I think about running all the time, Tomorrow I get to go running again. Or, I just need to make it through these 70 laps in the pool and then tomorrow I can run again. I'm as obsessed now as I was 10 years ago. It's refreshing and such a relief at the same time.
- I really love physical activity. There are a whole variety of reasons that I wasn't active early in life, and it's too bad. I think that I would have enjoyed and benefited from it immensely. I try to make up for this loss at every possible opportunity by shoveling during snowstorms, taking the stairs everywhere I go, and just purposely trying to make things more physically demanding whenever possible. Sometimes I think that I would have been better off as a manual laborer than a college professor. Does that say enough about how much I love physical activity?
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