Why I Love Running

I wasn’t always a runner.  I was not one of those people who ran track in high school.  I was briefly on the track team in junior high, but I was too scared to actually run a race and was cut from the team for the next year.  I made a lot of false starts with running, no pun intended.  I would determine to go to a local track after school, would get a few minutes into a run, and would run out of gas quite soon after and quit.  Basically, I was non-athletic in the extreme during my teen years and early twenties.  Finally in my mid-20s I began cycling with my then-husband.  We would ride with our young daughter in an attached carrier, where she was well protected and free to play with toys while watching the scenery go by.  I don’t know exactly why, but I always thought about running and was eventually drawn back to it.  Tentatively, I would run around a small park in town, slowing down often, but gradually working my way up to longer runs. 

For many years I ran 5 miles at least a couple of times a week, even running a marathon and some smaller races.  It has only been the last six months or so that I have really ramped up my running, having run three half-marathons in the last six months and regularly running 10 miles one day per week in addition to several shorter runs.  At this point, I can’t imagine my life without running.

So why do I love running?  I get some of my best ideas while running.  I suppose that the brain is freer to think once the body is hard at work.  I enjoy listening to music while running and getting into the groove of my favorite, usually 80s, music.  I also enjoy the nicely tired feeling I get once I’m finished.  Running does get addictive.  If I go more than a few days without running, I get irritable.  Certainly, I like the health benefits of running as well as the calorie burning properties. Sometimes the first couple of miles are tough, and I wonder how I will make it through the next three or five or eight, but by the end I feel quite euphoric.   Additionally, I love logging time on my watch and uploading my workouts, seeing what I have accomplished.  Keeping track of my runs electronically is actually something I just started doing in the last month.  I’ve had a GPS enabled watch for years, but never really used it much.  Now, I never run without it and the paired heart rate monitor.  It’s exciting to see the results of my hard work visible on a computer screen, and makes an analytical person like me very happy!