Becoming a Runner

Since my first few posts have focused more on my history, I thought I'd post about something more current. For the last 10 months, I've walked the same route from my house to City Park, around Big Lake (yep, that's the name), and back--it's about 2.1 miles. I've slowly started incorporating more running, but for a while I was doing it without any sort of plan and wasn't really getting anywhere. Now I'm doing Runner's World 8-Week Beginner's Program, and so far it hasn't been too difficult and I feel like I'm actually making progress. We'll see what the coming weeks bring!

If you knew me in my former life, you'd know that I loathed running. I mean, really sincerely absolutely detested it. When I played soccer in high school, I'd fake* asthma attacks during "conditioning" (in quotes because it was really just a euphemism for run 'til you puke). I took Aerobic Walking as my PE class during my senior year in high school--occasionally the coach would make us RUN up and down a block a couple of times... cue the fake* asthma problems (in my defense, this was supposed to be a walking class--running was not mentioned in the description!).

*I do have asthma, but I'd fake these attacks maybe 30 seconds into running. My asthma wasn't THAT bad. I do use my inhaler prior to any physical activity these days.

Anyway, I hadn't really run since then. I started reading some weight loss blogs, and I found that the people who started running were really inspiring to me. I guess because they were just like me. And I started to think, "Wouldn't it be awesome to run a 5K half marathon marathon one day?" So, I'd like to ultimately run a marathon one day... in the far, far, far future. Right now though, I'm just focusing on week 3 of my running plan, and being able to run a mile without stopping (I've never run a mile without walking!):D

I was out the door at 5:45am for my run--5 minutes running, 1 minute walking, 5x. Honestly, I don't run much faster than I walk (and some of you could probably walk faster than I run!), but speed isn't the point right now. Right now I'm just trying to build up my endurance. I seriously wanted to just walk a few times, especially during the last 2 intervals, but I didn't! I knew I'd be disappointed with myself if I did that.

This was actually my fastest to date! I've been getting a little bit faster each week; even though there's more running time each interval, I run slower as the intervals get longer. So I'm happy to see that my overall time is still improving :)

It's already ridiculously humid in the mornings here in New Orleans, so by the time I finished my run, I was SOAKED with sweat. I love sweating when I exercise--I think of it as all the fat melting off of my body.

I'm off to work on the blog some more--I'm hoping to get a Weight Loss Stats page up, and a Goals page by tonight.