Loving to Run

Finishing my 1st Marathon. I'm on the far left.

The last couple days I have been completely reoccupied by two major things happening in my life. First, I signed up for the Comrades Marathon (as you know if you have been reading). Second, I am leaving for a 2 weeks trip to Italy (Sicily, specifically) in just 5 days. Talk about some major running and traveling milestones.

This weekend I plan to update you all about my trip to Italy and talk through the plan and what I am excited about. But, for now, I need to continue on my thoughts on Comrades. It is such a big decision to just SIGN UP and sometimes I think that is half the battle in most things. Just coming to terms that you are actually going to do something. Most of us get paralyzed in indecision. I'm so glad that in this moment, I have not allowed my indecisiveness to win.

Since I have signed up for Comrades, I have also been thinking a ton about love- what I love, why I love certain things, and what I do to acknowledge and appreciate them. We move so quickly through life, that many times we end up focusing so much on what we don't love that we ignore what we do. I wish I could exclude myself from that statement, but I cannot. I love running and I love travel. I hope that this blog is a statement to both of those things. But, I wanted to go deeper into exactly what I love about running. I know that over the next couple months I'll get a lot of questions of "Why?" "How could you want to run for that long, that far?" "Why would you wan to run 4 hours on Saturday and 2 hours on Sunday-- back to back?" I do it because I love to run and here are somethings I love about:

1- I absolutely love that it is practically free. Anyone can run, anywhere. It doesn't require significant gear, it doesn't require a rink/court/field, and anyone can do it. At the end of the day, it isn't about the type of gear you have, but about the type of body you have and how well you have taught it to run the way you want it to.

If you can smile while in pain, you know you are doing something right.

2- Running clears my mind...no matter what. All day today, all I thought about was coming home and running. It was all I wanted to do. It is about 99 degrees here today and I'm going to run at 9pm to avoid the heat, but I'm going to do it and I'm going to feel 10x better afterwards.

They must love it to wait in a corral like that

3- No pressure, but your own pressure. I used to have major anxiety issues when I was a kid about team sports. I never wanted to be the kid that was 3rd out in softball, or missed the fly ball in the outfield, or missed the serve in volleyball. I hated the guilt or disappointment I would feel from others and I never got any enjoyment out of it because of that. This is also why I never joined Cross Country or track teams. With running, it is me and me alone. There is nobody to impress or disappoint but myself. It also forces you to know why you are doing it. Because there is no team to hide behind.

It feels good.

4- Running has always been there for me...in my travels, in my life, in my happy and sad moments. It has been my constant and I know it always will be. I have run happy, I have run sad, I have run when tired, I have run sick, I have run in the rain, I have run in the blizzard, I have run in foreign countries, I have run in farmlands, and I have run on countless unair-conditioned gyms on treadmills. It has been the best way of seeing the world and put everything into perspective.

5- I just grew up with it. Both my Mom and sister were avid runners when I grew up. I mean, one of my first memories of summers was following my mom and sister running around the neighborhood at night, while on my bike. I always associated it with just "being". It wasn't working out. It was just a part of living.

What do you love that much that you would actually write it down? If you haven't, maybe you should today tell that something why you love it.

Sister and Mom. My original running partners.