modus operandi

Anyone who knows me is probably laughing that I have added another blog to my roster, and also that it’s a blog about running. I am not a runner, by any means, but I’m hoping I can at the very least become one in body if not in spirit. Essentially, my goal is to lose some of the weight that I’ve managed to put on in the past 6 months or so, so that I can get back to feeling happy and confident about myself once again. I don’t ever dream of ever being truly skinny (it would take a lot more than exercise, or maybe just a lot more exercise!, to get rid of the bulk of my curves), but I can remember a time (in the not so distant past!) where I felt content with my body, and I’d like to get myself back there. I maintained that size for several years, which makes me believe that it was a reasonable place for me to be. I don’t weigh myself, because I don’t really care how much I actually weigh, but am focused more on how I feel and how my clothes (from skinnier days gone by) fit. I’ll know I’ve hit my goal when some of the jeans that are currently too tight finally fit comfortably once more!

Just a bit of backstory, some of you know that right before Christmas 2007, Tony and I started taking advantage of the workout facilities at our complex. I started running on the treadmill, which I didn’t exactly enjoy, but it was only for 20 – 25 minutes each day, which was a time commitment I felt I could honour without feeling I was giving up too much of my free time (seriously, I hate to exercise, because there are at least 4 or 5 other things at any given time that I would much rather be doing). I popped on my headphones and set my ipod to my upbeat “work OUT!” playlist and went to town… It was hard at first, but I was impressed with how quickly I progressed. By the end I was running 1.5 miles (about 2.5 km) in 20 minutes, and not even stopping to take a break! I hated the running, but the feeling of accomplishment each time I made some type of advancement (I started off not even being able to run 10 minutes straight) was really rewarding. Plus, I definitely felt like physically my body was improving from these workouts, even if that rate of progress was slower. Of course, then Christmas came and I went a few weeks without a treadmill. The routine fell to pieces, and when we came back from break, getting back into the swing of things was even harder than before. Partially this was because we returned right after New Year’s, when everyone has vowed to get in shape, meaning the workout room was always bustling, and frequently neither of the two treadmills were free. It was really demoralizing to psych ourselves up to go run, only to get there and find we couldn’t use the equipment. We briefly swapped to the elliptical machines, but the satisfaction wasn’t there for me, and after two weeks or so, we just stopped going to the gym altogether. We were quitters.

Fastforward several months and here we are. Tony and I have both finally reached a place where we realize that as much as we dislike running and prefer being lazy, it’s time for us to get ourselves healthy and lose some weight. It sucks to feel as though your back is up against a wall, but for us we really felt like if we didn’t do something now, things would only get worse, and we needed to catapult ourselves in the opposite direction. We’d tried limiting portion sizes and all that jazz, but to get us feeling good again, we new we needed a more forceful catalyst. I was worried Tony would laugh or be unenthusiastic, but instead he embraced the idea, even if out of necessity. I tentatively broached the subject of running outside (something we always mocked others for in the past) two weeks ago, because I realized I needed to make our workouts as easy as possible. That meant removing all possibilities of failure and excuses to NOT run, and certainly one of those was relying on equipment that wouldn’t always be available to us as the treadmills were. The street is always there, and so whenever we’re ready to run, it’s there waiting. No excuse there. Furthermore, we always take the dogs out right when we get home from work, so by incorporating that into our fitness regime, we lessen the likelihood of us putting the run off until later in the evening (which can easily become “never”), and we also don’t have it looming over our night. We get it done within 30 minutes of getting home, and still have 5 hours of the evening to enjoy. Finally, now when we run, we run together, without ipods, meaning that rather than viewing our workout time as unfortunate time spent apart/alone, we can use it as time to bond and strengthen our relationship.

Anyway, I read a few of the online books on running provided through the school’s library system, and found us a beginner’s guide to running which we could follow for the first 6 weeks. Tony used to run before we met until he injured his knee, so I knew it would be important for us to pace ourselves appropriately in order to literally keep him on his feet. To that end, we also went out and purchased new running shoes, and for once I forewent the pair of shoes that was the prettiest and instead bought the pair that felt the best on my feet (also, I found out I have a neutral foot)! Per our beginner’s guide, we’ve been running every other day, and just going for 30-min walks on our rest days. We started off slow (walk 15 min, run 1 min then walk 1 min for 5 min, walk 10 min), but we’re definitely progressing. There’s been some tweaking along the way, as sometimes we do a regime several days over until we feel comfortable with it, and our route has changed. We used to try to do a big loop so that there was no backtracking, but our community is incredibly hilly, which was making our runs unbearably difficult and painful, so we’ve now found a better path, which keeps us mostly on flat roads.

Ok, so the aim of this blog then is to keep track of my/our progress, and to keep me motivated to continue. I’ve found that running outside rather than on the treadmill is WAY harder, and I want to give myself every opportunity to succeed! I’ll try to log how long I ran, how far that was, and anything else of note that occurred during our daily jaunts…

On that note, I think I’ll end this intro post and write a brief entry about last night’s run!