Run, run, as fast as you can……

I ran 4 miles this morning; it is something I love to do, and although I have been running for the past 27 years, I still don’t consider myself a “runner”. Runners, to me, are those amazing gazelle like creatures whose feet don’t seem to hit the ground and who finish a race long before the rest of us have hit the first water station. Do they even break a sweat? My first experience with running was a painful one. Remember the Presidential Fitness Awards in middle school where you were required to run ONE WHOLE MILE? I do. I thought I was going to die! I could barely walk the next day, every muscle in my body ached. I hated it. I think I met whatever requirements were necessary but I made a promise to myself that I was going to do better the next year—-and I did. By the time I was in high school, I had worked up to TWO miles every once in a while. Our tennis coach didn’t require a whole lot of running from us, just some sprints here and there. We were a good team, but far from great. In college, I was running five miles on a regular basis and it was not long before I ran my first half marathon. I must have been 21 or 22 at the time. I figure if I just ran really slow, I could probably finish and not die. Despite my best intentions to run a marathon by the time I was 30, it actually took me another 10 years to complete that goal. So what does any of this have to do with photography? Indirectly, quite a bit. Here are some reasons why I run:

1. BECAUSE I CAN. I am not built for speed, my legs are much too short but they work. My goal is to run the Carlsbad Half Marathon as long as I can for the rest of my life. It always takes place around my birthday, it is my present to myself.

2. IT’S CHEAPER THAN DRUGS, ALCOHOL, AND THERAPY. I don’t know if I have ever experienced a “runner’s high” but I know that 9 times out of 10, I feel much better than I did before I started. Plus it keeps me from eating/drinking too much the night before.

3. ALL YOU NEED IS SHOES. That’s it. Run in whatever clothes you want. If you run at the beach, you don’t even need shoes. If you run at a nudist beach…..

4. PARTY OF ONE TO TEN THOUSAND. You can run by yourself, which I usually do, or you can run with 10,000 other enthusiasts. It is something to witness, a sea of heads bobbing up and down for miles and miles.

5. IT KEEPS ME YOUNG. When I first started running, I remember seeing the “older women” of 40-something who ran and thinking to myself, that I wanted to be like them someday, old and still be able to run! Sheesh. I can honestly say that I can run farther and have more energy than many younger women…

6. I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO. Every year I keep thinking I should take up some other form of exercise but I never do. Any suggestions?

Lately, I am training for the La Jolla Half Marathon which takes place at the end of April. It starts off in Del Mar and finishes in La Jolla. Should be amazing. After that, my last (scheduled) half marathon for the year is in August, America’s Finest City Half Marathon, which starts at Point Loma and ends up in Balboa Park. At the end of that race, I will receive an additional medal for having completed the Tripple Crown (everyone who completes the race in the alloted time gets a medal). It is the best part of running a race, that little piece of shinny metal. Silly, but it’s true. You also get a shirt. And a banana. Really.

My first (and last?) marathon. It takes a lot of time to train for a marathon! Been there, done that.

My best friends. We have a date every weekend and a couple of times during the week, if possible. They, or their brethren have seen me though good times, bad times, and a whole lot of in-between times, through rain, snow, sleet, hail…. actually, I love the rain but I don’t like getting wet (it makes me cold) so I am mostly a fair weather runner but I have ran in single digit temps in MN. I couldn’t breathe but so it goes!

These are my running medals, mostly from the Calsbad Half Marathon. I usually only do one half marathon a year and just run 4-8 miles for fun on the weekends and whenever.

This is where my medals live, on my messy desk. The small photo is of me completing the LA Marathon. My family was there to greet me at the finish line—it was great!!

The gorgeous man in the photo is Jim Bunke. I will write more about him one day… but not today.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 and is filed under a day in the life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.