I’m going to be blunt: I don’t know why I love running. It’s an oddity in my personality, like a weird crystal embedded in an otherwise uniform piece of rock. I’m generally a mild-to-moderate effort kind of guy. In almost everything.

When I started to get in shape in ‘09, I really wanted to be able to go for a run again. I don’t know why running was a goal, though. I was never a runner in high school or college.I remember once teasing a friend who ran cross-country that track was for people who couldn’t run and do something that took real skill at the same time.  In fact, in high school preseason soccer conditioning, I hated the timed one or two mile tests we did with a passion. For a little while at Chinquapin, while in my mid-20s I ran semi-regularly, but even then it didn’t have any particular hold on me. It was mostly to stay in shape and keep up with the high-school kids I coached. The only really positive running experiences I can point to were the Thanksgiving turkey trot races I did annually for a few years with Dad and Jim. 

Family is a part of the makeup of that strange crystal. My family has always been pretty active and fit. Doing adventurous things and playing sports, or taking long walks, or working hard in the yard is just something we always did, together. When I got out of shape, there was no active shaming at all, but my family still did talk about their adventures and exploits: mom was doing cross-state bike rides and dad’s never met a strength workout he wouldn’t try. Jim’s job. Actually the reason I decided to get into shape was a one-two punch of feeling terrible trying to keep up with family. The first was getting super short of breath swimming with Tyler and Jordan before they moved to Germany. The second was when I went home to Albany for Matt and Sarah’s wedding, which was between Dad’s 64th birthday and my 39th. Dad showed me a series of exercises he was doing to keep in shape. It. Kicked. My. Ass. 

I had a mid-life crisis on the plane ride home, and went zero to sixty to get in shape. My  new iPhone 3G let me download LoseIt, and I became such a calorie cutter that one day a coworker in the hospital pulled me aside and said “eat a damn donut. I’m sick of your sulking.”  As I moved from measuring time on the elliptical in hours instead of minutes, I kept the fantasy of getting off that hampster wheel and going for a run as a beacon in the distance. When I had lost a certain amount of weight, I could go for my first run. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t hurt myself by starting too early. I also wanted to force myself to keep at it until I had “earned it”. I don’t really know what that means. I’m struggling to figure it out on the fly, right here, right now. 

I talked my wife into getting me a Nike-Fuel run band, which predates the Fitbits we all have now.  For Christmas I got myself a nice new pair of LiveStrong warm-up pants. They were so the in thing back then. I’m not a clothes shopper, but I think I put more care into picking out those pants than my wife put into her wedding dress. I don’t remember if it was Christmas morning or if I forced myself to wait until New Year’s day to go for my first run. It was one of those rare sub-freezing spells in Texas, and those pants are still one of the best Christmas presents I have ever given myself. Lance Armstrong’s an ass, but he made good pants for a while. I bundled up in a hat and gloves and headed out from my front door for all of a half a mile. Everyone who’s ever started a couch to 5k knows exactly how horrible I felt. Moving frigid air through my lungs didn’t make my body feel any better. Those were incredibly meaningful steps for me. That morning I reaped a reward after 6 months of work sticking to a plan. I began something I still can’t define.