Learning to Run, Part 1

Beginning with walking is easy and makes me feel in command of my body. My limbs stretched forth proudly to fill the track lane, no stagnate treadmill would do. I wanted to feel the wind. My mood lifted and I was determined that this, this run will be accomplished. Those first steps to heave my body into a run were pure awkwardness. My body had certainly run in the past, even interval runs. Although, never for more than a minute at a time. What was wrong with my system, my body?

I remembered back to quotes in Scott’s book about the strangeness of running for the first time or running for the first time in a long time. Albeit, most of the quotes were from women running in the seventies and eighties when women just could not possibly be serious runners, or could they? As those feminist thoughts flowed through my mind, my attention wavered back to the awkwardness that melted into a graceless lumbering down the track where my thighs saluted and flexed to my brain’s command.

There it was, the light breeze on my bare face and arms and the rhythmic swaying of my ponytail. I was lumbering, but I was lumbering to a rhythm. After a minute, I was confident that I could go for two. After two minutes, I pleaded with my heart to slow to the rhythm of my staggered walk. When my heart recovered two minutes later in sync with my unyielding stride, I just knew I could not run for two minutes again, not so soon and not with this sharp pain in my collar. What the heck does my collar have to do during running? My wretched lifestyle of inconsiderate eating and inertia somehow dug into my shoulder as a reminder.

I compromised with the evil pain sitting on my right shoulder like a vice and ran for one and walked for one. My vice muffled and I pushed myself to run for a minute and a half, reminding myself that soon I could walk for eleven and a half minutes and I would be done.

My second interval run on Wednesday, January 6, went quite the same way, but it was my heart I was pleading with rather than having my vice whisper, “you can’t do this” in my ear. I discovered my heart does not whisper; it grasps the lever in my brain that controls my legs and thrusts it to walk without discussion. We will see if my brain can cajole my heart into easing off the lever. Perhaps training five days a week will spur my heart to last longer and longer. That is my hope.