Outdoorsy(ish)

Part of the reason I feel inspired to write a blog about my slow moves towards actual human fitness is that I’m hopeful it will help motivate me. I’m not a natural athlete. I love a number of sports, in particular soccer, but my love has only caused me pain, my disenfranchised intellect looking on as my body failed utterly to accomplish what it knew needed to be done. Not the physical type, really. At all.

I am, in addition to a lack of sporting skill, the type identified by Jim Gaffigan as “indoorsy.” Funnily enough, this extends to my exercise as well. I quite like weights, particularly once I realized that the fact I don’t lift very heavy weights isn’t necessarily a bad thing (at least not to start with), and I’ve always done plenty of cardio indoors. Most recently, I’ve been running indoors. Runners tell me they hate running indoors but I don’t mind it. It’s a track, I run on it, I listen to podcasts, the timer beeps and I stop. Done. I’ve always been able to click into a disturbingly Orwellian sense of hopelessness in my exercise and it helps to pass the time. I’ve mostly lost the fire of my early 20s, when I lost about forty pounds by listening to heavy metal and actively waging war against my own body. Nowadays I’m not as prone to wage war by running across a battlefield or staging advances across my own expansive flank. I set up shop and wait it out. It takes longer but it works.

This morning I decided to try something different. I have hit a bit of a lull in exercising, partly due to tiredness from work and home and partly to the unexpected setback of gaining weight after overeating and drinking alcohol for a week. So I got to work and didn’t even give myself a chance to chicken out; I immediately headed off on an outdoors run. To make things more interesting, I dropped the music and went without distractions. This also meant to time for the run, but I wasn’t worried about that. I mostly wanted to do a run close to (or in the end slightly shorter than) my recent work-outs outdoors and see how it went.

Hills, what’s the deal with those? Downhill slopes, no matter how gradual or how brief, feel like a gift from the divine. God above has taken mercy on me, an idiot that has is trying to improve his health by shuffling around and calling it running on his blog. He gave me this; He GAVE it to me: a downhill!!! Oh my God, I love downhill slopes. Love them.

From whence has this love suddenly sprung? Of course, it comes from the sheer hell of running uphill. I actually have uphill preferences. I don’t mind relatively steep slopes too much because I get into the challenge until near the peak, when it becomes one big fiesta of self-loathing and acid reflux. No, it’s the gradual slopes I can’t stand, the ones that never actually become even close to what this beginner could credibly claim as being challenging. It’s the humiliation. Not humiliation in front of other people. I don’t care about that though I did find myself speeding up more than I thought possible to overtake two walkers this morning; no, I’m talking about the indefensible impact of my complete and utter lack of fitness.

At the heart of the whole experience, of course, lay what I guess runners call The Wall? I didn’t think I’d really encounter The Wall, though it’s entirely possible that’s because I’ve basically been gently bumping my head against it for weeks now. I encountered it this morning though. I always thought The Wall was something you hit and then got through a minute or so later. I guess I don’t know what I thought; I hit the wall approximately 500 metres after I started running and didn’t get past it until just after the two mile mark.

Once I got past it though! The pain just lifted. I had pain down the back of my calves the whole run (I’m long since past the point of worrying about these things; I could probably warm up more effectively but I think it’s mostly my brain using every dirty trick it can think of to get me to stop and drive to a McDonald’s immediately) but the bigger issue had been the fact that I was breathing like a drowning man the whole way with my entire cardio-vascular system screaming at me as loud as it could. This just lifted, and suddenly I was in a very strange space indeed, mentally…

I was enjoying my run.

This is an important statement. Firstly, I was enjoying myself. Not enduring it, or willing it to end by thinking of all the cheeseburgers I was going to eat this weekend, I was enjoying it. Secondly, I was RUNNING. Not at a particularly great pace (I’d guess about 10:45/mile based on previous experience) but running nonetheless. I even broke out into a couple of faster runs, down under 9:00/mile I would think. Those didn’t last long but they existed.

All of this comes down to some surprising solutions:

• I can run outdoors and not die.
• I can actually run stronger at the end of a 2.6 mile run than at the start. This bodes well for the first 5k.
• I enjoy running without music or podcasts. 

The last one might have been the most surprising of all. I’ve run outdoors before and so, if anything, was perhaps a little disappointed at how much of a struggle I had today. I’ve always been a big believer in music or podcasts to distract me from the exercise though. Today was different. I quite liked thinking aloud to myself, even if a lot of this became begging myself to continue. I thought about work a little, and I looked around. Checked out the park. It was nice. Outdoorsy.