One of my fondest memories as a kid was from when I was about 13 years old. I remember being by myself behind the grade school that was just a 2 minute walk down the road from our house. I was standing at one set of goal posts on the soccer field with the other set firmly in my view. A couple of deep breaths, then “BANG!” The starting gun in my mind went off and I exploded into a full run. About a quarter of the way down the field I hit my stride. My feet barely seemed to be touching ground, they were just every so often brushing it to keep me afloat and moving forward. It was one of those moments where everything else seems to have faded away and it was just me and the wind, coming as close to flying as a land bound kid can come.
I used to love running. Sprinting in track and field, cross country, or just sprinting around the house in a rain storm. Something about the body shaking rhythm, hypnotic in its regularity, quiets my generally overactive mind. It lets me focus on just one important thing; taking the next step.
Somewhere in time I lost touch with this. It was about the same time I realized my new found the love of sitting in front of the computer, and it was continued by the lure of intoxication and the killing of braincells with my friends a few years later.
Soon smoking entered the mix, and before I realized what I had done to myself I was incapable of recapturing that feeling I remembered so fondly. Any attempts at fitness ended with frustration and disappointment with myself because I couldn’t do much of anything without bringing on a smokers coughing fit. The memory was just a memory that I felt like I would never be able to recapture.
Flash forward to the present day…
I am no longer a smoker, but I have not come much closer to reliving the dream. This time, my excuse is simply laziness. It took a while to even come to admitting that truth. Years of a sedentary lifestyle have left me with extra pounds and a cache of excuses that have been weighing me down, keeping me motionless. The most running I have done in the past few years has been with the WASD keys on the keyboard as I navigate virtual worlds. Hardly a substitute.
However, as previously mentioned in Part 1, I have found my motivation. I’ve tossed out my excuses (Some of which I will discuss in Part 3), and I have started to run toward one of my fondest memories.
3 workouts down, the rest of my life to go.
I’m sore, but at least it’s not from bearing the burden of my excuses.