Running

This evening I managed to run for 10 minutes without stopping. This left me in a bizarrely euphoric state, frantically messaging various friends.

JUST RAN FOR 10 MINUTES WITHOUT STOPPING

STILL BUZZING

I'll probably clean up and repost the piece I wrote last year about losing weight sometime (maybe when I reach my final target weight) but the short version is that I lost about 4 stone last year (of 6 I want to lose total). This has had a number of knock-on effects (which I'll explore in yet another post somewhere down the line) but one of the more significant ones is that I've started running. You might expect those to happen the other way around, but one thing I realised from previous weight loss attempts is that larger bodies are not well-suited to running. I wanted to make sure I'd be able to go longer than 10 seconds without completely dying, so I waited until I'd lost a bit first.

I started doing Couch To 5k back in October, but took a break from it in December as I wasn't able to consistently run for the lengths of time it required. I started just running a set route and seeing how long I could run for at a stretch. Four minutes, five minutes, six minutes. I developed a routine of running to certain places and slowing down there, but today I decided to just run for as long as I could, and lo and behold: 10 whole minutes.

I'd like to stop and observe for a second just how weird it is that I've become a Running Person. I said something to this effect when I saw my friend Jon for the first time in a couple of years over Christmas. He was in my PE class in secondary school, he remembers how it all but killed me trying to do the "bog trot", a looping course through the nature reserve adjacent to our playing fields. I have never in my life considered that I might want to run or enjoy it in any way. And yet: I've become one of those people! I am noticibly crankier if I go several days without running! I have Running Conversations with other friends who do running. I genuinely enjoy it and try to talk other people into doing it too.

The best part of it, though, for me, is its freshness. I've never done it before! It's all brand-new to me! I've got so many milestones ahead of me. I'm told that once you hit 45 minutes you can go for hours, and I can't wait! I probably won't have the time to do it all that much but the possibility itself is intoxicating. It's like never playing videogames and then suddenly being able to play all videogames.

Then again, I'm pretty sure that observation is the basis of an xkcd joke, so perhaps all this running is making me worse in other ways.