My Journey With Health And Fitness – Something Strange Has Happened

Halloween was a little disappointing this year. Because it was going to be on a Friday I ordered extra candy anticipating that we would likely get more than the 120 kids we usually see. Little did I know at the time that we would end up with an extremely rainy day and the Jays would be playing in the World Series for the first time in 32 years. We still got 70 kids but trust me when I say that we have a lot of left over candy to somehow dispose of. I have a meeting this afternoon so maybe I’ll take some treats to the attendees.

When I turned 55 nearly 5 years ago (yes I am only 2 months away from 60) I made this odd decision to take up running. I really have no idea why I did it but I somehow got in my mind that I wanted to be able to run 10km. I got a coach and 8 months later I was comfortably running 10km which morphed into 14km then 18km and finally 21.1km in a half marathon. I had no idea I had any of that in me but apparently I did.

I want to remind you what running was like for me. I absolutely hated it. The only way I could get through it was to either do mantras in my head to encourage me, think about how far I had gone then at the 1/2 way point how far I had left or just concentrating on how much I hated running. That runner’s high? I have no idea what that actually feels like. The only time I ever really wanted to run was just after my brother died because I knew that it would keep my mind seriously occupied so I wouldn’t think about what happened. Of course then the ankle was really bad so running was out of the question.

Over the past few weeks I have probably done about dozen full runs of at least 5km. This includes today though I will admit when I got up it was pouring so I knew I needed the treadmill. However, the TV in the garage was not working so there was no way I was using that treadmill. Fortunately my husband fixed the TV and I just finished doing a 6km run on the treadmill before writing this post. Anyways, I was doing a 6km run down at the beach on Thursday and all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t thinking about the run, I was just enjoying listening to an audio book. I reflected on the past few weeks and thought, wow, things have really changed because not once have I had to encourage myself or count distance, I just run. I have no idea how or why this happened but it has. I guess because I missed running so much somehow my brain has decided running is much better than it was before.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still don’t get that mythical runner’s high that I keep hearing about. What I do get instead is an enjoyable workout and pride when I am done. I will be so disappointed if the specialist on Friday tells me I have to give it up again but I am hoping that isn’t the case. Yep, I may at some point have to concede that I am a runner.