Setting Goals

Last week I was sitting in my office trying to psych myself up to go to the gym. In the course of this, I idly wondered if I'd ever be able to run a mile.

In high school and college I took gym classes that forced me to "run" a mile. I was supposed to improve on my time over the course of the semester. But I've always been a horrible runner with no endurance. At most I could make it about halfway around the track before I found myself gasping for breath. In high school this led to the discovery that I can walk a mile faster than I can run one, and in college I basically just gave up. This strategy meant I had to wait longer for breakfast (Physical activity at 7AM should be outlawed), but at least I didn't feel like I was going to die.

It didn't help that one of my former dance teachers had informed me that running dislodges one's uterus. I've had this horrible vision of running around a track and suddenly finding that my uterus has fallen out of my body for years. And even though I knew that plenty of women run every day without losing organs, I avoided the activity out of irrational fear. This "fact" came from the same woman who told me I could tell I was getting too fat when my period started back up. Clearly I should never have listened to a word she said. But when things play into your prejudices, well, you tend to hold onto them with a death grip.

After I joined a gym the whole running thing got framed a bit differently. I was supposed to jog for five minutes at the beginning of my workout to warm up. In the beginning, this was nearly impossible. But I pushed through and eventually it got easier. I was able to up my speed a little. I could still do it if I increased the incline And my heart rate (taken at the end of the 5 minutes jog) was slowing down. All of these were signs of improvement.

Then, at my friend's wedding in San Francisco, I managed to run half a mile on the treadmill. As someone who'd barely been able to make it an eighth of a mile before, this was a huge deal.

So last week I got it into my head to try and run a mile. It would be okay if it took a while to get there. This was just something I'd be working up to. A mini-goal as I start to get serious about alternating weight-lifting and cardio. At any point I could slow the treadmill down and walk for a while.
On my first attempt I surprised myself by running 3/4 of a mile. Listening to music helped stave off the boredom (why is cardio so boring?). More impressive was the fact that I wasn't terribly short of breath. I didn't have a stitch in my side. I had to stop running because of a shooting pain in my ankle.

See, never being that serious about running, I hadn't bothered to procure appropriate shoes. I'd been wearing a pair of old sneakers to the gym every day. They worked fine when I was lifting weights, but didn't provide enough support for me to run for extended periods of time.

With said shoes purchased I attempted my mile again on Sunday. The shoes aren't quite broken in yet (I miss my days of pointe and breaking shoes in with a hammer), so my ankle was still bugging me a bit (actually, that's probably because of dancing en pointe, too). But I made it through the entire mile, even though the last tenth was a serious challenge. At that point, I couldn't just give up.

I can now cross "run a mile" off the list of things I've never done. Now I can actually focus on improving my time of 13 minutes. Or maybe running a mile and a half.