Running my arse off

I tend to come around to things late and in strange ways. Mostly because I'm so stubborn. I've always been a "kind of" runner--in other words, a walker and jogger who occasionally went faster and farther. I remember reading a blog entry from a fellow native North Louisianian and acquaintance (go see abchao.com for lots of pretty things) that claimed "real" running was a realistic option for anyone, absolutely anyone, willing to feel uncomfortable for awhile. She had gone from doing very little to competitively running races in a short amount of time. I shook this off. Somewhere in the back of my head I put runners in another category from myself. Roommates, friends would run marathons or half ones or whatever, but for some inexplicable reason I never imagined I could get there. They were just people, my kind of people in fact, but they seemed otherworldly because of this one thing.

So of course I wait until the hottest summer of my life (temps measured at 109 in central Austin just a mile from the house yesterday) to re-envision my running abilities. I spent all of May hurting, as trusty AB said I would. Getting to the one or two mile marker consistently proved difficult at the beginning; the heat combined with those months of stationary dissertation writing to press down on me. And an earlier version of myself probably would have given up and moved on to the elliptical or made do with integrating some good old fashioned power-walking. But somehow I said, screw it, this is happening, I am not stopping again. And now I shout from the rooftops that yes, oh yes, this running euphoria is possible for anyone. I wake up early every morning and zoom away now, putting miles under my feet not necessarily with ease but with drive, clarity, and a sense of worth of it all.

If any of you out there have been watching the HBO show Girls, then you know that there was a scene directly illustrating such a conundrum. Hannah, our complaining, out of shape, yet brilliant-writer narrator insists that she was not "made" for exercise. I laughed when I saw this, because I'm pretty sure I've said that before.

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