There is a lot of running that happens near me.
Many of my friends are runners. They run on riverside trails and up mountains, and sometimes they go to places like New Zealand, just so that they can run there.
I’ve been to a lot of running events, 5Ks, and half-marathons. I’ve written before about how I adore these events; I love the support, the feeling of community, and the joyful distribution of bananas.
But I’ve never been the one to actually do the running. I just stand on the side and cheer and cry, even if I don’t know any of the runners.
Oh, and sometimes I drive a golf cart.
But in an unexpected turn of events — I run now.
This comes with some assumptions, I’ve realized. You might think this means that I run fast. Or I run for a long time. Or I run well.
But none of those things is true. I once visited a running store to find the perfect shoes, and they asked me to demonstrate how I run. As I trotted up and down the length of the store, they said, “Is that how you really run…like…normally?”
That may be a result of breaking my back as a kid. I have an unusual gate, which just gets increasingly chaotic as I speed up.
My body doesn’t run or jump naturally. I recently tried to jump on one of those box things at the gym and somehow ended up hitting my face on it.
“I’m very earthbound,” I like to say, and I flip my hair just a little when I do, as if it says something profound about my soul and its connection to the planet, and not just that my legs are not used to doing that thing.
However, I recently started going to a gym and was intrigued by the treadmill. So I read up on running and liked the research behind Sprint Interval Training (SIT). It appealed to me because it means running for just a little bit, and then recovering for a long while.
And when I say I run a little bit, I mean a very little bit. The recommended sprint is 30 seconds. But for those 30 seconds, I run Zombie-Apocalypse-level full-out—and then I walk for 2 minutes. Then I run for another 30 seconds, and I do that on repeat for 20 minutes.
But it feels like cheating to say I’m running because that voice in my head says: you’re not a real runner, people are going to think you run for hours and win marathons, so just shut up about your silly little fake running thing. You should be embarrassed.