I have never been a run­ner. Lit­er­ally. Even back in high school when I played Foot­ball and rowed on the Crew, I ran as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. In fact I didn’t do wrestling because their work­outs required long dis­tance runs.

As far as I know, I never ran a com­plete mile — until a few weeks ago. On August 14^th I churned out a 12 minute mile on the treadmill.

What hap­pened? Did I carbo load? Did I load up on caf­feine? No. Noth­ing spe­cial. Just men­tal. That evening I went to the gym and decided to run. I had run a quar­ter mile a few weeks before and that night I decided to see how far I could go, expect­ing a half a mile or maybe three-quarters. So when I churned out a full mile, I was shocked. I had run a mile! And when I told my brother, he said some­thing amaz­ing and uplift­ing to me:

“You know who runs miles? Ath­letes. Like you.”

Now I’m cer­tainly not an Olympian. And per­haps even the term “ath­lete” is still a stretch, but I like the idea of being one and its amaz­ingly moti­vat­ing as I’m run­ning towards it.

I had tried to do the Couch to 5k Pro­gram before when I lived in Orlando, but I fell off a wagon and never started it back up. The Couch to 5k pro­gram focuses on train­ing you to run increas­ingly longer times, start­ing with run­ning 60 sec­onds and walk­ing 90 sec­onds repeat­ing both for 20 min­utes. What they’re doing is that they’re train­ing you to endure pain and push fur­ther, it trains you to run longer dis­tances and be accli­mated to the feel­ings of pain.

That’s where I had a dis­con­nect with run­ning. Pain. I did not really grasp that run­ning meant work­ing through pain, I sort of believed that if I were a run­ner — then run­ning wouldn’t hurt.

I don’t know where I turned the cor­ner, or what caused it. But I real­ized that run­ning is always going to be painful. I mean sure, the bet­ter I get, the fur­ther and faster I can go before it hurts. Run­ning is about the chal­lenge of it.

Even though it was only a sur­pris­ing mile run, it hear­kens back to the story about Dean Kar­nazes dis­cov­er­ing he could run for hours.

DEAN KARNAZES WAS SLOBBERING DRUNK. IT WAS HIS 30TH BIRTHDAY, and he’d started with beer and moved on to tequila shots at a bar near his home in San Fran­cisco. Now, after mid­night, an attrac­tive young woman – not his wife – was hit­ting on him. This was not the life he’d imag­ined for him­self. He was a cor­po­rate hack des­per­ately run­ning the rat race. The com­pany had just bought him a new Lexus. He wanted to vomit. Kar­nazes resisted the urge and, instead, slipped out the bar’s back door and walked the few blocks to his house. On the back porch, he found an old pair of sneak­ers. He stripped down to his T-shirt and under­wear, laced up the shoes, and started run­ning. It seemed like a good idea at the time. — Wired

I’m still not a long dis­tance run­ner, and I have no idea how far I’ll end up run­ning, but I’m work­ing on it. I’ve dis­cov­ered that as long as I’m not exhausted, then I can sit down and run a mile. I might be in pain, I’ll prob­a­bly have a stitch in my side, but I’m get­ting there.

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to me as I learn to run, because it feels so odd to do some­thing that is, in many ways — com­pletely new.

You have to walk before you can run. Well, I’ve been walk­ing for 28 years, it’s bloody well time I learned to run.