Running? Moi?

Part One

As the sort of person who likes low-impact, creative types of exercise, I've always been very anti-running.

In the past, the following things have been heard from out of my mouth

- Running is terrible for your knees.

- Have you ever noticed the pained and desperate looks on all runner's faces? Running must feel really crap. They never look happy.

- I can't run. It makes me feel like i'm going to vomit.

- It makes women's uteruses drop out.

All the bad press about the bad things running can do to your body, combined with the grizzled expressions on every runner I ever passed, and traumatised memories of enforced cross-country running at high-shool, had confirmed to me that it was one of the crappest exercise forms ever, and I wouldn't be caught dead doing it, ever.

So no-one was more surprised than me to find me in my sister's hand-me-down Nikes, "running" along the promenade recently.

In my defense, I was desperate. It was the only form of exercise I could think of that didn't use upper body (the biceps tendon to be precise), and, looking back, the seeds were being sewn over the last couple of months. My biceps tendon physio is a keen runner, so there may have been some subliminal messaging there. A friend who moved overseas took it up for want of any other option in her new town. Two other friends - beautiful, dainty, professional dancers - told me, separately, about how they'd taken up running. When they said it, they both looked as surprised about it as I am about myself now. At the time I just thought they were crazy, but the fact that they were doing it must have given it some validity and slightly shifted my subconscious perception of the hated sport.

Because then there I was, one morning, on the promenade, somehow.... well it's hard to describe exactly what you'd call this shuffling/brisk-walk kind of forward propulsion I was doing, but it was an approximation of running.

Of course every other runner passed me, some power walkers even passed me, and I stopped frequently to walk in between the bursts of optimistic shuffling. Importantly, and this was key to my trying it again the next day, I didn't once feel like throwing-up.

Part 2 continues...