How this running thing got started...

I've thought for a while about starting a blog to chronicle my adventures in running but never sat down to get it started until now.  The best place to start any story is at the beginning and that is where we'll begin.

As a youngster  I never really enjoyed running.  I don't know why, but it never appealed to me.  When I started college I started running because I had a ton of time on my hands, however it only lasted the first semester of my freshman year.

The next time I took up any sort of running was for the military.  It wasn't for the joy of running, but it was done to pass the mandatory physical fitness test.  The test required a 2 mile run and I rarely ran more than that distance to prepare for it and I typically barely meet the minimum standard to pass the run.  After I was discharged from the military I stopped running.  That was in 2006.

December 2009

Fast forward four years to 2010.  I'm overweight...well, I had been overweight for quite a while.  The truth is that I'm obese.  OBESE!!!  Most people don't believe me when I tell them that but the numbers don't lie.  Looking at myself in the mirror I didn't see the person who I wanted to be.  I wanted to be healthy.  I wanted to be fit.  I wanted to be the me when I graduated from my Advanced Individual Training from the Army in 2001.

At New Years 2010 I told myself (like I had previous New Years) that this year was going to be different.  This year I was going to change and lose weight.  I didn't have much of a plan. Around the end of January I started getting semi serious and started changing what I was eating.  A few pounds came off over the course of the next few months, but it wasn't a real attempt at changing my life.  A few things occurred in April 2010 that did.

On April 11th Jim preached a sermon titled Bad Health that really impacted me.  That night my friend Matt (who had just started running a couple months prior) asked if I wanted to run a 5k with him -- on May 8th!  I told him that if I could run 2 miles at 21:00 or faster by Saturday that I'd do the 5k.

So on April 12th I started doing interval work on our treadmill at home.  On April 17th I took a two mile run outside with my friend Matt.  I beat the cutoff time I had set for myself so I committed to the 5k. I keep running to make sure that I was as prepared as I could be for our 5k.

Jim's sermon touched my wife as well.  The week of April 11 my wife declared that she was going to run a half marathon.  I asked if she was okay with me running it as well and she told me that it'd be great if I ran it as well.  We settled on the Waddell and Reed in October 2010.  So now we both had a big goal to shoot for.

The morning May 8th arrived.  My friend Matt who asked me to run a 5k with him was in Nashville helping with flood relief so I was heading off to my first race by myself.  I had a good race and finished in 27 minutes -- nothing spectacular, but it was starting point for the rest of my journey.

Finishing my first 5k

And that is how this running thing got started...