I am not now or have I ever been a runner. To include me in that group would be a disservice to runners the world over. I am a jogger and there’s a huge difference. Runners are the “sports cars” of the “personal transportation” world. Joggers, well, we’re the tour buses. For us it really is all about the journey and not the destination. Which is good because we spend a lot more time journeying.
I grew up hating running. Due, in part, because of this minor issue I’ve had with my weight. I guess you could say I was “gravitationally challenged.” That, combined with my love affair for Newton’s first law (a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless influenced by an outside force), meant I would have no trouble earning and keeping my college nickname, “Bionic Pudge.” And I lived up to the reputation. Any exercise such as running and/or jogging was totally foreign to pretty much every single cell in my entire body.
I was “introduced” to jogging as a freshman in high school. That was the year I went out for football. Coach had this “thing” where any time someone made a mistake, they would have to run laps. I can still hear his voice, “I hope that’s not Dave underneath that pile.” “Uh, it is Coach.” “I want you to start running…and don’t stop until I tell you.”
I won’t say I made a lot of mistakes but I spent so much time doing laps, the Cross Country coach came out and took a look at me. Even back then, in arguably the best shape of my life, there was no blazing, blinding, blast of speed. I was the third slowest runner on the team, besting only a guy who was mentally challenged and, I kid you not, a guy with a broken leg. I did however discover how incredibly gullible I was. Coach came up to me after one practice and said he was looking for a few of us to “turn on the speed.” Now I ran the 40 yard dash in about ten seconds. You could walk 40 yards in about ten seconds…with your dog. There was no way I was going to “turn on the speed.” And nothing proved that more than the fact that I was the only person on the freshman team not invited to try out for the junior varsity team. So my athletic and running careers both came to an abrupt halt at about the same time.
In the decades that followed I flirted with running. And had pretty much the same success as with my other flirting (hence the 52 years old and still single…). It wasn’t until I turned 50 and a routine exam turned up high blood pressure. My doctor said that I’d better do something or face a lifetime of meds. Now I’m not a big fan of meds, and the thought of being tied to a bunch of pills and my HMO for the rest of my life was more than I could bear. So, I actually listened to what the doctor said.
I started walking. Thirty minutes a day, seven days a week. And, wonder of wonder, nothing happened. The blood pressure stayed high. Which was a blessing in a way because I could always say “my blood pressure,” when someone asked me, “What’s up???” It almost always got a laugh. But I wasn’t laughing. I was upset that I hadn’t lost any weight and with my BP on the rise, figured one day my head would pop off much like the thermometers that get really hot in the cartoons. So, I decided to jog.
Did I mention I’m out of shape? Did I mention really out of shape? Did I mention I’d get winded getting up to go to the refrigerator during commercials? Uh, yeah, I’m out of shape.
I needed a plan and came up with a revelation. I was going to start jogging. I was going to start slow and easy. I divided my thirty minute walk into six five-minute segments. Then, I jogged for fifteen seconds and walked for four-minutes and forty-five seconds. Rinse, repeat. So my first day, I jogged a total of a minute-and-a-half. And the rest is history. From that very auspicious start, I’ve been able to build up to my blazing marathon pace. I “jogged” my first marathon last year. I finished in four hours and forty minutes. The top runner in my category (Male, 50 – 54) finished in two hours and forty-five minutes. I was out on the road for an additional two hours while he was back at the finish line, sipping margaritas and getting phone numbers of all the other female runners. But I did it. I did something I literally swore I would never be able to do. And I wasn’t even voted “Most Likely to Need Resuscitation During the Marathon.”
So now I’m a jogger. Some days it can be a challenge. But there’s always an incredible sense of wonder and awe when I realize that, in jogging as in life, I can reach places I can’t even see. I just put my head down and, remember what my Mom used to tell my sister and me when the three of us would walk the three miles into town: put one foot in front of the other. And it worked. I put one foot in front of the other for twenty-six miles, three-hundred and eighty-five yards. For me, it was definitely the road less traveled …and it definitely made all the difference!
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