[Tuesday: 3.4 miles; today: none yet]<\/p>\n
I started jogging toward the end of my college years.\u00a0 I guess it would have been about 1984(?).\u00a0 And I have been at it more-or-less ever since.\u00a0 I suspect there have been a few weeks go by that I didn’t get out at least once.\u00a0 But not very many.\u00a0 I said “jogging” above because I am slow and have a body not really configured for speed (long torso, short legs, kind of stout).<\/p>\n
My older brother was a runner before me.\u00a0 I have never run with him that I remember.\u00a0 But I think his example kind of opened me to the idea.<\/p>\n
About 4 years ago my wife was challenged by someone to start a “couch to 5k” program, to run an upcoming 5k race.\u00a0 She did that.\u00a0 And then she went on to do 10k, half marathon, marathon and 50k races.\u00a0 She is really into running now, way beyond anything I ever did.<\/p>\n
I did a few races with her at the beginning but now she is much more into racing than I am.<\/p>\n
And our son has recently started to run quite a bit also.<\/p>\n
He invited me over on Tuesday evening and we ran together around the North Farm at Mississippi State.\u00a0 There is a gravel road loop that makes 3.4 miles according to his Garmin GPS. He runs quite a bit faster than I do and he had to slow down to accommodate.\u00a0 I was running faster than my normal pace.\u00a0 We found a workable middle ground.<\/p>\n
He has a half marathon scheduled for early 2016.<\/p>\n
I don’t think there is anything magical about it.\u00a0 Running has both exercise and meditative benefits.\u00a0 If you run for an hour, that gives your mind a chance to unwind, you get exercise endorphins and you get muscle\/skeletal development.\u00a0 Usually there’s an outdoors\/fresh air aspect to it also.<\/p>\n
There can be dangers, but they seem small compared to other activities with similar benefits.\u00a0 You can fall down, you can injure yourself through overuse or poor form (it is a repetitive activity), and you can get hit by a car or cyclist.\u00a0 There’s no water to drown in, like with swimming or rowing.\u00a0 There’s no parachute to fail or bicycle to crash. Concussion risks are low compared to interpersonal contact sports.<\/p>\n
Every once in awhile someone will have a heart attack during a marathon or something.\u00a0 That is usually a surprise since people running a marathon have probably already run 10 times that much in training.\u00a0 There was even a nationally ranked runner who keeled over at a race.\u00a0 Having run for years, why then?\u00a0 Blaming it on running would be like having\u00a0 a heart attack in the bathtub and blaming it on hot water.<\/p>\n
And non-runners always point to Jim Fixx who wrote about the benefits of running and then died young.\u00a0 The lesson there is that if you are running to increase your life span it may or may not work.<\/p>\n
But if you enjoy it, there’s probably nothing about it any less healthy than other activities you could be doing.\u00a0 I think that’s the part that people don’t understand:\u00a0 it’s recreation, an activity of enjoyment, it’s fun.\u00a0 And it is difficult, so there is a measure of earned pride in accomplishment when things turn out well.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Tuesday: 3.4 miles; today: none yet] I started jogging toward the end of my college years.\u00a0 I guess it would have been about 1984(?).\u00a0 And I have been at it more-or-less ever since.\u00a0 I suspect there have been a few weeks go by that I didn’t get out at least once.\u00a0 But not very many.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-running"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4997"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5001,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4997\/revisions\/5001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}