Running Through Life

I have another blog called American Life, but that kind of faded out with the arrival of CE back last year, but I am also hoping to start publishing there again. As many of you out there is Blogland know, a new born child tends to take all of your available time, and then some. With prayer and perseverance, we have made it through the first year and time constraints have eased somewhat. This is a return to blogging, but also a refocusing on what now consumes a good portion of my free time....running.

To give you a bit of background, I ran cross country in high school, but I was not very good. I was the runner usually first out of scoring, although sometimes I would matter by bumping others down. My pride and joy was a time of 21:07 for a 5k. Of course my teammates were running in the 16's and 17's so I seemed SO SLOW. Now looking back 21:07 seems almost mythic, that is just over 7 minutes a mile. I don't even know if I could sprint a 7 minute mile right now. This brings me the point of the running.

I have sporadically run over the past few years, nothing too serious. This winter, I became literally disgusted with myself. My weight had steadily increased over the years and I was rapidly becoming severely overweight. The thought of my daughter seeing me as this fat old man scared me. Let me contrast this with the Wife, who is the only person to over get told by the doctor to "eat more salt, your blood pressure is a tad low." We make interesting contrasts in food preferences; I love potatoes and bad things like hamburgers, fried food and Taco Bell. She loves.....veggies. Strange, those veggies.

So I have been running this year, and while this blog will recount with some regularity my running exploits, it will also be about life through the lens of running. I believe that distance running gives the runner time to think and reflect, so hopefully I will be able to provide adequate entertainment, and relate to you what it is like for a regular overweight guy to suddenly get semi-serious about running. Cheers.

-JD