Giving It Another Go

   According to my Garmin, the last time I ran in earnest was March 27. So, give or take a day or two, I have not run in two whole months.
   The hardest part about this realization is that I had very few reasons not to. A couple of little physical hiccups kept me off the road for what only needed to be brief periods of time but the reality of it is that I have simply not felt like running and nothing much was really going to force me to get out there. Yes, I have been feeling guilty about this.
   So today I got out and ran. Technically you could call it running only because it didn't fit the "walking" definition. I ran as slow as I possibly could because the only goal for today was to run. A dedicated speedwalker would have passed me.
   About half a kilometer into it, I developed a sharp pain in my right knee. This kind of popped up out of nowhere and I was a little perplexed as to its cause. Then I remembered---the infamous "falling down the stairs" episode about a week ago. You can read about it here, chronicled in my "other" blog. It had nothing to do with running so that's where it went. At the rate I have been falling down the stairs lately, I could probably start my own blog dedicated to falling down, but that's a whole other story.
   Because of the knee pain, my run at least momentarily turned into a walk. After a short walk, the pain seemed to have disappeared and I returned to slow running.
   It was a beautiful and sunny day today, temps around 25C (77F) and was the warmest weather I'd been running in since last summer. My original plan had been to run the usual 5K route I'm accustomed to but, because of the knee pain, I changed my plans and decided instead to head for Warbler Woods and maybe shorten things up a bit.

Love all the little flowers lining the trail.

   The last time I'd been in the woods was early Spring and none of the leaves were out yet. Today, however, nothing but greenery! Really should have taken a few more pics but at this point I was more in survival mode. I was forcing myself to run up the hills in the woods and there are a fair amount of them.
   At one point I ran into a woman who was hiking who said she was having a hard time handling the hills walking, she couldn't imagine running up them. Told her I'd be walking again in a minute and she'd probably catch up to me.
   Unfortunately, the people who run the parks here in London have closed off the section of trail I normally run on, so that it can "regenerate". I guess this is good for  Warbler in the long run but it does kind of screw me up....

New boardwalks!

   Before I knew it, I was out of the woods and back to sidewalks again and back home again for a 4K run/walk.

This was obviously a checkpoint...

   It always feels like starting all over again every time I'm away from running for an extended period and then start up again. It's times like these that I find myself remembering what it was like back in the old "Learn To Run" days, when I could barely run for two minutes straight. This makes me feel a little better...
   Hopefully, I'll be able to get out a little more regularly now and not spend so much time procrastinating and rationalizing. As hard as the work was today, it sure felt good! 

Random Thoughts

  I haven't run in well over a month. The first couple of weeks of that time period were taken up with healing a strained back. The rest of the time I have not run for no reason whatsoever, I just haven't.
   I've had plenty of opportunities to get out there but I've managed to rationalize my way out of all of them. Occasionally the weather's been iffy but even when it's been perfect I still don't run.
   Because I'm not running, the pounds are slowly creeping on, as well. I think I was up to 232 the other night.....
   Okay, no real running to blog about so I think I'm going to toss a few random thoughts out there!

1. Watching skinny people run by

   We've all seen them, their lithe bodies effortlessly gliding along the road or sidewalk, breathing easily, looking like they weigh about as much as your leg. What I would really like to do sometime is run up alongside one of them and give them a fifty pound back of cement to carry, just to even out the weight differential!

2. Being able to lose weight easily

   Knowing you can lose weight reasonably quickly and easily is a dangerous thing sometimes! Pretty well anything you want to will go in your mouth if you know that you're not going to have a problem shrinking it away later on. I actually got giddy once when I stepped on the scale and had maxed out at 235 (the heaviest I've been in years) because of the fun I was going to have losing it all again. Which is okay if that's what you actually do...

3. Falling off the vegetarian wagon

   I managed to maintain a vegetarian diet for about four months late last summer and early autumn. I was eating lots of vegetables and running consistently and actually feeling pretty good. But I was sad! It wasn't that I was craving the meat so much it was that I had somehow abandoned an important and enjoyable part of my life for what a lot of people likely thought was no good reason. It affected me in social situations where I had to be the one different guy, the guy other people had to out of their way to accommodate. When Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled around I desperately needed to be a part of what my family was doing and that's when I fell off the wagon, huge. And when that happened, I wanted every kind of meat there was, seemingly! This does disturb me, I hate the fact that animals suffer so that I can be fed food I don't need to be fed. Grrr

4. I think I'm supposed to be a sprinter instead

   Intellectually, I like to think of myself as a distance runner. My gut feeling, though, is that I just want to run fast, for about a hundred meters at a time. Any sport I've ever played has always involved short bursts of speed with an accompanying recovery time before the next burst. I have always kind of lived for this. In my twenties, on the football field, I was the guy you were going to need to make allowances for if you were going to cover me. In my sixties, on the ball hockey floor, I'm the guy who you're going to need to work a lot harder at running past than you thought, if, indeed, you can run past me...

5. I need to run in the mountains 

   I follow a lot of bloggers from out in western Canada and get to see a lot of pics of people running through forests, on mountains. I was born out west and it kind of eats me up watching runners do this. There is something about forest trails!

6. I am kind of a beast (for short periods)

   Yes, I'm a slow distance runner, at least right at the moment. I'm big and heavy but I have legs that get me where I want to go and, occasionally, they get me there quickly. This is no mean feat and sometimes they amaze me!

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   So there you have it, a short post of mainly random thoughts, a couple of which might have something to do with running!