on the abundance of running

i know i promised playdoh, but i went running tonight and was reminded about the amazing thing that happened last week with respect to running.

a little background (always with the background) : up until now, i have not been described by many as thin. i would certainly not have been described as a runner. it surprises many people to learn that i have been known to dabble in the jogging arts. one guy spat out his coffee. but i think he gets surprised easily, particularly while drinking.

in my youth, i was a member of the middle school volleyball and basketball teams. oh, and track. i loathed running, but you simply could not volley a ball, put a ball in a basket, or put a shot without having to do some running. oh how it did bring tears to my eyes to have to run those lines in basketball practice. and i was not a quiet crier. i think everyone was a little relieved when i discovered golf my freshman year. yay! a sport where i could hit a ball without having to run! who knew?!

and now back to the present. a few years ago, i decided that i was going to be decidedly immobile if i didn't start moving my substantial sitting point regularly. i would walk to the top of a steep hill nearby, then run down the hill. surely running downhill was still running?

then i found running to be fun in hawaii, and somehow got talked into running the marathon. that was my fault. i cleverly promised everyone that asked me that i would run the marathon with them IFF i wasn't pregnant. ha HA! i was full well expecting to BE pregnant that year.
then december came. no pregnancy. so i signed up. 15 miles in, i get really sick, and a pregnancy test later confirmed that i was, in fact, pregnant. so i'm not annoyed to have stopped at that point.

but i had very clearly got the running bug by that point. i had grown to love the feeling produced in your lungs by all that exercise-related breathing. i had never felt so good in all my life! and i had been to a harry belafonte concert! no, wait. .. i had never felt so good in my life and i had drunk malibu rum? i felt good.

so a few years and another child later, i decide it's time to hit the pavement again. 10 minutes is a long run when you haven't run in a few years. 5 minutes is a long time to run when you haven't done it in a few years. i found myself again in the situation of someone wanting to run some marathon, and i always say 'sure,' so i said 'sure!' now, just to recap, a marathon is 26 POINT 2 miles. thankfully, we decided on the half marathon. again, that's 13 POINT 1 miles. not just 13 miles. you're not done at the 13th mile. you're done a tenth of a mile later. if you collapse at 13 miles, you haven't finished! anyway. enough focusing on the lack. that summer, my new-found friend and i built up from 10 minute runs to 2 hour runs. 2 hours! there's activities i *like* that i don't even want to do for 2 hours! but i wanted to want to do it. and we did it.

and the day came. whereas in the honolulu marathon, i'd started walking at the 10th mile, this time i ran the whole 13 POINT 1 miles. to be fair, my friend wouldn't let me stop, knowing how annoyed i'd be that i didn't run the whole thing. (thanks jenni, you totally rock!). so me, the little girl who cried in basketball practice because she had to do a bit of running (i mean really, couldn't i just stand there and make the baskets? i could do that!)

but that's not the amazing thing about my running experience.

if someone ever called me petite, it would make that guy spit coffee again. large women don't run fast. up to now, i hadn't run very fast at all. in fact, there were points in the honolulu marathon where i would stop to walk and would actually be going faster than when i went back to jogging! in the cardiff marathon, a double lap of the half-marathon, when the lead marathoner passed me and my running partner, we decided to try to keep up with him for as long as we could. for about 4 seconds, we sprinted. that dude was going like a freight train, and he made it look like he was sleeping! i think he made that relativity noise as he passed us. my point is, speed is a spectrum, and it's clear which end i'm at.

my overall point is ever-so-close to being made.

my daughter has swimming lessons at a local pool. the sport complex is on my half-marathon training grounds, butte park. a couple times, i've done some running while my daughter gets on with her swimming lesson. i have experienced a whole new level of happiness by doing my old loop in much shorter time, but that was mainly down to me dropping 31 pounds. oh it's so nice to do the route that used to take 12 minutes in 10.

but the most amazing thing of all of this happened last week. i went for the run, and 5 minutes into the run, i realized that i really only had another 12 minutes before i had to be back at the complex to help my daughter get dressed (it's a case of saying 'will you put your clothes on!' on continuous loop). so i decided to turn around at the 7 minute mark, and run back, leaving me 3 minutes to make my way to the locker room. at the turn-around point, i started to think about some of these LOA concepts. in particular, on The Secret cds there is a point where Rhonda talks about needing to lose weight simply because we think we need to lose weight, so that's what we get - the experience of needing to lose weight. it struck me that i run (faster but still) slow because i *think* i run slow. so why not *think* i run fast? i found myself just running faster without effort. i made it back to the complex an entire minute earlier than i'd hoped! for those of you that are saying 'big deal, one minute,' for me it's HUGE! and now, i run fast! little me, who shirked most of the running in her youth and grew to the 14 stone mark at one point, am 11 stone and can run fast! wooooo hoooooo!

i have a 10k i'm training for. i'm now setting the intention that i will complete the 10k in 1:10. this will be a year to the day after i ran a half-marathon in 3:01. huge.

okay, the playdoh will have to wait until tomorrow.