The History of Running.

Flashback: September 2009. I have a marvelous friend who is not only a genius physicist and astronomer, but also the most fit person I've ever met. She takes me to my first day of weightlifting at the gym. Twice (and sometimes three times) a week over the course of the fall semester, we meet in the weight room, usually the only women among throngs of sweaty men. We do twenty minutes of cardio before an hour or so of lifting.

January 2010. I'm overweight enough that I had to have my bridesmaid's dress for my best friend's wedding altered less than a week before the big day. I start hitting the gym four or five days a week, two days for lifting and the other days for cardio. I alternate between the bike and the stairstepper. In February, I graduate to the elliptical.

February 19, 2010. I finish thirty minutes on the elliptical, and something catches the corner of my eye. The treadmill. I haven't touched a treadmill since I worked my way up to running a single 10-minute mile in the fall of 2007 (and it took over a month to get that far). I stare at the treadmill for a few minutes and eventually decide to hop on, just to see if I can do it.

I run a mile in ten minutes. Without having to build up to it. I'm almost crying of happiness. Until this point, one mile is the farthest I've ever run.

In March, I work up to two miles. In mid-March, three miles. I stick with three miles for many, many months. I do a miraculous four miles with my boyfriend, Sean, one evening in late May--my longest run to date.

In June, I have surgery. I'm banned from running for two weeks. Two weeks later, I can barely run a block without pain. A month after surgery, I can do a slow mile. I run off and on through July and August.

October 2010. After not running for almost a month, I make a ridiculous decision to start training for a half-marathon. During my pre-training week, I can't do three miles at a stretch without slowing down to a walk. We go to Michigan to visit my marvelous friend and I'm staring at all of her race numbers that she has posted on her wall. I know I can do this. If she can do it, so can I.

I started my training in early October during one of the warmest autumns ever in Wisconsin. For the first two weeks, my long run was three miles, done with Sean by my side to motivate me. I struggled to get up to four miles in weeks three and four. On week five, with a long run of five miles, we got lost and ended up going almost six. I've increased one mile per week since then.

When I tell people that I've started running, they react very similarly by all stating that they could NEVER do that. And until I actually started to do it, I told myself the same thing. This blog is to prove to myself that I CAN do it. And not only CAN I do it, but I AM doing it. I'm living it, right now, and it feels AWESOME.

Just because I'm the slowest runner ever doesn't change the fact that I'm a runner.