How did this interest in running start?
In October 2006 I was relocated to my client's headquarters after spending over two years in a small and dingy office in a residential Vancouver neighbourhood.
The first thing I did was sign up for membership at the gym located in the basement of the HQ office. For a corporate gym, it looked well serviced and had lots of equipment and even a reasonable amount of space to use it in. The onsite staff was friendly and it appeared that the patrons were "fit, but not too fit".
For many years prior to this relocation, I had been using power walking in combination with a bit of weight training to fend off middle age gut and to keep the ticker in reasonable shape. This had worked well but I had come to the point where I needed to do something different. A colleague recommended running. I had said the knees couldn't take it and I had never run more than 1 minute at a time in my entire life! Even the power walking was starting to strain my right knee to the point where I was feeling pain for hours after a particularly brisk walk.
So I was powerwalking on the treadmill at the HQ gym one day and decided, hey, why not just try to run? The attempt would prove I am not a runner and I can think of another thing to do.
I set the treadmill at 6.5 mph and ran for about three and a half minutes. I then went back to walking. I felt the burning in my legs and was definitely out of puff. OK, that was that.
The next day, I realized that I was not sore from this experiment. Hmmm. Let's try that again. I did, only I walked a bit, ran a bit, walked a bit for a couple of cycles.
The world did not end and my heart did not leap out of my chest. I realized only many months after that the 3 day a week power walking, starting slowly and building up to a brisk pace, had provided the foundation for my ticker to take the pounding. The knees were not complaining because, apparently, I was engaging my leg muscles in a sufficiently different way that I did not stress them out as much...yet!
By the time Christmas 2006 came round, I was running/walking 3 times a week. By the end of the year, I could run for 15 minutes non-stop and including two walk breaks I could complete a 3o minute session with minimal negative effects.
As 2007 started, I was ready to extend the exercise program to run/walk longer. I had decided that the most obvious goal for someone living in Vancouver was to run in the Sun Run, held in mid-April each year. I encouraged my work colleague who initially got me thinking about running to sign up as well, as my personal pace bunny. She accepted.
By March I was aiming to try to run the full 10K of the Sun Run, but wasn't confident enough in my "ticker self-awareness" to do this without some sort of feedback. I therefore rationalized the purchase of a Polar heart rate monitor, the rs200sd model. A new toy, coloured red because that's the colour of the blood that would come squirting out if I ran too fast and things inside popped. This toy, in combination with a vigilant pace bunny, would keep me safe.
April arrived and my pace bunny advised me that trying a training run or two outside would be beneficial prior to the race. Up until that time, all the running I had been doing was indoors on a treadmill. My initial reaction was "running was running" but that was just an excuse. With a beautiful park located right next to my client's office, complete with a marked 5 km trail, I really had no reason to complain about the hassle of outdoor running.
One week before the Sun Run 2007, I took my first running strides on an outdoor surface. This resulted in two learnings:
- The treadmill makes it seem that you can run faster than you can.
- Asphalt and dirt path are very much softer than a treadmill.
With as much experience as I could muster, I was ready for Sun Run 2007.
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