I’m a runner.
I haven’t always been a runner. Way back when, I ran cross country and track in high school. I wasn’t great by any stretch of the imagination, but I was decent. I think my best mile was around 4:50 or so. After my last track meet, I hung up my running shoes and that was that.
After high school I went off to college and got a degree in engineering from the University of Missouri – Rolla and started my working life. A year after that, I married Kathy (also a Rolla grad) and we began living happily ever after.
22 years after hanging up the running shoes, I started running again. My 40 year old body was soft. I wasn’t exactly overweight, but no stamina or muscle tone was in evidence. I’d stayed somewhat active, playing different sports at various times, but my most recent sport (vintage base ball) wasn’t exactly the best way to stay in any aerobic kind of shape. I bought a new pair of running shoes and started running.
Starting again was a bit of a slap in the face. I wasn’t having a problem with the routine of running, but my speed and stamina was in a whole different universe then what it was 22 years before (duhh!). A good incline on the treadmill and a 5 mph speed was able to reduce me to a quivering mass of flesh. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be! I used to be able to run 8-10 miles in an hour!
At our Christmas family gathering in 2007, my younger brother Jason got wind that I started running again and challenged me to run a half marathon with him. He was planning to run in the Country Music Half Marathon in Nashville. I took him up on the challenge and started to exercise with a more concrete goal in mind.
We ran that race together and it infected me with the running itch. Jason started talking about running a marathon and I caught the fever. He then started talking about running The Comrades Marathon, a 56 mile race held annually in South Africa. Of course, all this and neither of us had even run a marathon.
At this point I’m more then slightly obsessed. I’ve got a personal goal to run a marathon or ultra in every state and on every populated continent (Get bent Antarctica!). Other goals include running The Comrade’s Marathon in South Africa both in a down year and in an up year, marathons in New York, Chicago, London, Berlin, Rome, and Athens and a 100 mile ultra marathon.
