I Never Saw It Like That Before

I received two questions from my first blog, so let me answer those. They were, respectively, "why did you start running?" and "how did you first become involved in running races?" So on the first question:

I lost my eyesight in October of 2001 (age 43) and had a multitude of eye surgeries up to January of 2003. I was unable to exercise for almost all of that time (during which for 90 straight days I had to lie still on my right side for 12 out of every 24 hours, so that the scar tissue would be discouraged from tearing my retina apart yet again). So I gained over 40 pounds and wound up with high blood pressure and high cholesterol. 

My physician advised me to start jogging 5 minutes and walking 5 minutes, and after 20 minutes turning around and doing the same thing to get back home. I was initially resistant, because I spend a lot of time on Coast Highway and all of the runners I saw looked like they were in misery. I could not image voluntarily running.

After regaining most of my eyesight, I was in the worst physical shape of my life, due to the required inactivity. And I did not want to take medication for the blood pressure and cholesterol.

I had always been a good athlete, but had never enjoyed running. As a baseball player (pitcher) my outfielders were for running, not me. And as a tennis player, running means you are losing the point or the match. The objective in tennis is for your opponent to be running. not you. In any case, I did not like being 50 pounds overweight and on medication, so I took my physician's advice. I alternated 4 segments of jogging for 5 minutes and walking for 5 minutes, from my house in Solana Beach to the beach and back. And at first it was real hard, because I was so out of shape.

But it turned out it was not so bad. I would occasionally see dolphins at the beach. One day I saw a whale spouting as it moved south. And on sunny days there were a lot of pretty girls to peek at too. I never saw these things before, because I was always working and I never had time to enjoy the beach. So it was fairly easy to stay distracted from the fact that I was running, albeit slowly. And gradually I started losing weight, and jogging a little more, and walking a little less, and going a little further. Being an accountant, I like to measure things. So it was easy to track how much weight I was losing, or how much farther I could go by jogging and walking one less minute each time, and so on.

And by early 2004 I had lost over 30 pounds, all the way down to 200, and I was able to run 2 miles without having to walk at all. And this felt real good. And then 2 things happened, in respectively October 2004 and February 2005, which got me hooked on running.

Tune in next time to find out about those two things! Pass me if you can!