Started running

So after more stumbles, I actually started adding a little running to my routine. I’ve started using a method outlined in the simply awesome book, Runner’s World Complete Book of Running, in which you run/jog for 2 minutes, walk for 4, repeating the cycle 5 times. Although my route is a loop, and a *smidge* longer than that, so I usually start a second cycle before I’m finished.

The goal is to steadily increase the minutes jogged over weeks, until finally you’re jogging the whole 30 minutes.

I’ve always thought myself as too fat and out of shape to run. That’s why this blog is winter walker and not winter runner. Well you know what? I’ve spent most of my life telling myself I couldn’t do things. And I’m not happy with that.

Getting out there on day one and doing it was incredible. I felt it the next day of course, but it was a good feeling. Like I was finally getting a move on. Walking is great and fun and I still love it, but I have more in me. So much more.

I grew up athletic, fairly so if I do say so myself. And with other things in life, instead of working at it to become better, I was content with getting by without working for it. When I turned 21 and had a “career” I stopped being athletic, even though my career (firefighter) really demanded it. I was again, content. I had made it through the academy, now on to life. I have better things to do than to get in shape.

I’m no longer content with that. I want more out of life. I want to feel the rewards of pushing my body to its limits, and then beyond them.

So.

I say this now. I am 36 1/2. By the time I am 40, I will have run a 3K, 5K, half marathon and marathon.

This non-sense of just skating through life is over. I want this.

“Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired.”
- George S. Patton