Here is how it happens.
You see other runners on the road and think bitter, angry thoughts. They’re all, like: “Look at me – it’s 5 p.m., raining and cold and I’m out on my run. Enjoy your commute home, slacker!” You hate them. Your own short runs start to get harder and your pace slows. You persevere, but you feel like you’re logging meaningless junk miles.
Then a day comes when everything goes right. You have time to run, you feel healthy and strong, and all you need to do is put on your shoes and step out the door. But you procrastinate, finding one thing or another to do (fold the laundry, answer the phone check your e-mail) while your window of running time gets smaller and smaller. That’s when you realize you’ve lost it: the will to run.
Now you’re at the crossroads. You spent years and years as a non-runner. You remember how much free time you had back then, how good it felt to laze around all Sunday morning or spend your lunch hour eating with friends, or be tucked warm in bed on a cold weekday morning. Those were good times.
But you also remember how you used to run out of energy part-way through the day. How stairs made you huff and puff. And how envious you were of ordinary people who set and achieved what seemed to be incredible athletic goals (Run a marathon! Complete a triathalon! Ski the Rockies!). You also know how hard you’ve worked to make yourself as a runner, and how easy it would be to make yourself a non-runner once again.
So, you lace up your shoes and venture out, telling yourself you’ll just run for 30 minutes, and see how it goes. You can even walk, if you want. The first 5K are awful … you really pay for weeks of low mileage. Then you notice that you’re half-way to a 10K run. The sky is blue, the air crisp and cool and the world full of shiny, happy people playing with their children raking leaves, walking hand-in-hand. For a few minutes, you actually forget you’re running. At 7K, you start to set goals for yourself – your next distance, a new time goal, an upcoming race. At 10K, you mentally compose a blog post about your experience and decide to get all Jay McInerneyand write it in the second person. You hope this won’t be too annoying.
Before you know it, you’ve run 12K (when’s the last time you actually ran longer than you intended?) and you know that the runner inside you has emerged again. And you vow not to let her go back into hiding.
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