I used to hate running when I was younger.
I was not a sports kid.
I spent a lot of time outdoors. I all but lived on my bike. I was in the scouts and we camped year round in all four Canadian seasons. I walked pretty much everywhere, including to and from school.
But running. It was not my thing.
The funny thing is that I can’t even really remember when I started. And when I first started I wasn’t at all serious, like, when we I was in University and went to the track on campus and I would do a couple klicks worth of laps with my yellow cassette walkman plugged into my ears for distraction, logging maybe fifteen minutes of effort before acting like I’d just conquered the sport.
When I got serious later it was because I had become a father. My kid was three months old and I could tell that I would need to get in shape for this parenting thing. My allocation of free time—an important negotiated asset when one is a new parent—was handed off to signing up for a local running clinic.
I wasn’t a sports kid, but a switch had flipped in my head and I suddenly found out I was a sports adult—at least a slow, plodding running sorts of sports adult.
That was almost nineteen years ago, and I still haven’t properly wrapped my head around it all.
This is my new running blog, soon to attempt to unravel that adventure and make sense of twenty years of being a sports adult. Welcome and stay tuned!
