2xMe
March 1st, 2010 § 2 Comments
Today I participated in my second ever fun run. A 10 km run around the river here in my home town of Warburton, a fund raiser for local community initiatives.
My preparation, given I am now such an old hand at this fun run thing, consisted of : 3 peanut butter sandwiches on Thursday, half a packet of chocolate coated teddy bear biscuits Friday (after I had gone to the trouble of cancelling my gym appointment that day) and absolutely nothing Saturday ( in fact I had classes all day which required I sit on my backside for 6 hours).
So what do I gain from the experience of running beyond my comfort zone? Well I did finish in record time – one hour and 7 mins, a new personal best for the distance and a whopping 14 mins faster then the last time. (Regular readers will recall my debut performance at Marysville last November)
And I realised that I fervently wish I could write down everything that I thought while I was running – then you would be reading something fantastically interesting instead of this drivel. When is someone going to invent a wire that connects to your brain via your iPod and records all your thoughts? Yes I see you‘re all rushing to the Patents office.
I also realised that if I am running twice as long as those long legged gazelles that leap across the finish line in record time, then aren’t I getting double the workout? With half the gear. I certainly don’t have a $160 pair of compression running skins or any of the accessories some runners seem to acquire.
It has also come to my attention that at 155 cm tall with legs less than half that, I am never going to be anything more than a jogger. Runners will always lap me and I will always be the turtle and not the hare in this little exercise called exercise.
And you know what, that’s very OK by me because I was out there and I did it for me, not for the competition. Having said that, I was first in my class – for my age, my height and my star sign, for the last 3 people to cross the line.
And that’s winning enough for me!
Fun Run to the Hills
October 28th, 2009 § 2 Comments
“Fun run” – two words that I never ever thought I would use in the same sentence. Yet as I write this I find myself sitting here with the curious notion that I have just registered myself in a ten km fun run in Marysville this coming November 8th.
Running and I have never been friends. I was the surly teenager who begrudgingly stomped around the oval in P.E. and have always scoffed at the idea of ‘the zone’. Sure I have done many other types of activities but running, that endless foot strike after foot strike, felt like a sentence to eternal boredom.
Ten km will be the longest distance I have ever attempted, and given that I only started running last May, and could barely manage a one minute session on a treadmill back then, symbolizes a significant achievement in the story that is my life.
What’s changed I ponder? The overriding outtake is that I have found a resilience within me that I never knew existed. When I started those one minute intervals on that gym treadmill all those months ago, I made myself ‘make it” by remembering my experiences giving birth. Each labour contraction lasted longer that I minute and I made it thought that, so how hard could it be to just keep running another few steps?
And beyond that, the fact that suddenly ‘going for a run’ became a code for ‘taking some time for myself’ and the space for free thinking away from life, and there was a natural and inbuilt desire for one minute to become two, then three then more.
Treadmill
So now I have 2 weeks to go until my big fun run debut – my first in 40 years. My training ground is now the trails and tracks that survey the foothills of Mt Donna Buang in the Yarra Ranges, and no matter which way I set off, my run is set against a backdrop of mountain ranges, blue skies and fern gullies. If nothing else, the exploration of my beautiful little part of the world is incentive enough to go for just one more minute!
And theres something else. I still get to run the lush greenery of my home town. Our friends at Marysville, for which this fun run is raising money, face a very different and recovering landscape. Seems like a small thing to put one foot in front of the other, in comparison to rebuilding a life from a razed earth up.
