Running, I guess...

I've never enjoyed running.  Mind you - I (usually) enjoy exercising, and if I'm participating in an athletic activity that happens to incorporate running (for instance racquetball), I've got no problem with that, but I've never enjoyed running for running's sake.

With regards to the sports I participated in during high school, running during practice was something that was endured (and quite often dreaded) in order to build stamina and speed.  In football, we would run a number of 40 yard sprints at the end of practice before heading in (usually 15 or 20 of them).  Sometimes only 10 if it was the day before a game, but if we had not practiced well, it could be as many as 20 or 30.  Wrestling practice meant running stairs, and not just at the end of practice, but also at the halfway point.  Off the cafeteria (where we would roll out the mats for practice), there was a 2-flight stairwell.  We would usually run up and down that bitch 25 times in the middle of practice, and then again at the end.

So I came to see running as a "necessary evil" if I wanted to get or stay in shape.  Way back in the day (and we're talking late 80's/early 90's here), if I was going to "work out", that basically consisted of my running a mile and timing myself to gauge my progress.  It would take anywhere from 7 to 10 minutes depending upon what kind of shape I was in, and I'd call it a day.  (Wow - 10 minute workout there big guy, I'm baffled as to how you managed to balloon up to over 300 lbs.)

Well, I saw that a color run is coming to our area in a couple of months, and I'm not sure what got into me, but I somehow thought this might be a cool challenge to put out there for myself.  I've read a number of posts where people talk about going through a "Couch to 5K" program, that takes you from a non-runner to running a 5K in about 8 weeks.  Of course, there's a (free) iPod app for it as well:

My daughter became interested in the color run when I mentioned it, so today we both did "week 1, day 1" on the app.

Look how easy day one is supposed to be - alternating between 1 minute of running and 90 seconds of walking, but son of a mother did it suck.  "Running" on the elliptical is one thing, but with today, I was made keenly aware of how much more energy it takes to jog my 256 lb fat self on actual roads.

It wasn't so much the energy expenditure, as it was the motion that really upped the suck factor.  Our family went to Disney World a few years ago.  My son was about 6 or 7 years old, and was a bit tentative about the "scarier" rides.  We had gotten a book that previewed all of the rides, and there was a dinosaur "safari" type ride that he had deemed not too scary, and really wanted to go on.  Well, after we all belted in and set off, I could tell it was going to take a turn for the worse for him.  He hated it, and it took quite a bit of let's say, "creative" convincing later on the trip to give "Space Mountain" and "Tower of Terror" a shot (but that's a story for another post).

The funny thing about the dinosaur ride that freaked him out was that it wasn't the Jurassic Park-esque point in the ride where the T-Rex gets right in your face and roars at you because he thinks you ate the goat that he had been saving for himself,

but the bumpy, jarring motion that you felt the entire ride.  This is what running felt like - that constant bumpy jarring motion.

Often times, this is the point in the post where the author writes "...but I didn't hate it, I'm becoming a runner!"

Yeah, no, put me down for "I still fucking hate it".  But we're going to see this thing through until the color run and see where that takes us.