Let me be completely up front and honest, I hated running with a passion! I never liked running, of any distance, and previously my furthest running experiences had been a whopping 1 mile. That is about the extent of my running all through my life. I’m sure I surpassed that during baseball in high school, when we had to run sprints, but never of my own decision and hardly ever multiple times a week. So needless to say starting distance running (or what I consider to be distance) was not high on my list. Nevertheless, Greta was running and she really liked it so I figured I’d start just to be able to run with her. So here we are 7 months later and I’m running farther than I ever imagined. I previously posted about my longest run ever. Well I blew that out of the water on Saturday when I hit 5 miles. I don’t know what happened. I just felt really good the whole time and I think I hit my target pace for longer distance running. In reality, I probably could have done another mile or two because I felt really good. I’ll post the details of the run later, but this brings me to the basis of my post, what is it about running that is a love hate relationship?

Sometime I really like running and sometimes I really really hate it. There are days, like Saturday, that I go out and feel amazing. The adrenaline is flowing, I get frequent kicks within the run that helps me make it through and it just feels great. I also love the 30-60 minutes of free time during the run to think about things, listen to worship music, and yes, sometimes have a praise and worship session while running. It is awesome to have “quite time” during the run just to listen, worship and talk to God. I’ll be honest, talking to God for 30 minutes is hard if you’re just sitting there trying to pray, but when I’m running, it doesn’t seem that hard. So why do I hate doing it sometimes? I’m not sure. Some days, I have to push myself to do it. Some days I get out there and at the end of a 2.5 mile run I’m beat and struggled through every minute of it. I felt no kicks throughout the run and my worship music served as little more than background music to the agonizing 30 minutes. I just don’t understand it. I guess it is like that for pretty much everything that you do in life though. Some things just get repetitive and boring and running is no different. Sometimes it is more of a chore than anything else.

Saturday was different though. It was slightly raining and fairly warm. We wanted to stay close to the house just in case it started raining hard. We could then make a bee line to the house and hopefully spare our iPhones from getting wet and causing bad things to happen to them. We decided to run around the block. So when I set out, I thought hey, I’ll shoot for 7 laps and if not, that’s cool. By lap 5 I still felt great and was at a comfortable pace. I wasn’t trying to push my pace like I usually do, rather I was holding back trying to hit that 5 mile mark. By lap 7 I felt awesome and basically sprinted the last leg. I ended the run to The Fight by The Classic Crime which sufficiently pumped me up to finish strong. So I only hope I have a lot more runs like that and who knows, I might even go further next time. I never really had the urge to do anything longer than 5 or 6 miles, but who knows, I’m allowed to change my mind right?