Biding My Time...Barely

   Last year, dead in the middle of a Canadian winter, I became a runner.
   I had taken my first tenuous strides toward this in the summer, at the beginning of August. Doralyn had registered us for a ten week Learn To Run course at the local Running Room and I spent August and September learning to do just that---run.
   I was pretty sure when I began that I would make it through this course and then just stop running. Really, I had never run before, found it kind of boring and could not see myself becoming a runner. Then a funny kind of thing happened when the course ended. I didn't stop!
   I kept on running, partly because I was starting to feel the health benefits and partly because I was amazing myself.
   Along the way, I began to ask myself the same question all of us runners have asked ourselves at one point or another. Am I a real runner?
   This question was answered for me in the middle of the aforesaid Canadian winter.
   I was running at the tail end of blizzards. I was running

One of my run days last winter...

through sleet storms. I was running through fog and rain. I was running on slush which turned to ice which turned to slush again, all in the same run. I was running in snow above my ankles. I was running in temps cold enough to bring tears to my eyes.
   This, then, was when I knew I was a runner.
   No casual jogger would have done what I did. They would have taken one look out the window and found something else to do.
   I actually put on the bulk of my miles over the winter. This is also when I lost the most weight. At some point, it occurred to me that running was something I was always going to be doing and I desperately began to look forward to Spring. Because now I was a runner.
   Unfortunately, Spring and PF arrived almost simultaneously. There were bare roads and sidewalks to run on but I couldn't. Gradually, the PF healed and I was able to more or less get back to where I was but then, all of then sudden, I've got biopsy stitches that need to heal and then, right after that, a three-week face treatment which also requires me to be on the sidelines. And I am still in the middle of that...
   I am anticipating that sometime in the not-too-distant future I will be running once again, unimpeded by outside forces. And when that time comes...it will be Winter again!