Running in the Rain and the definition of 'Awesome'

It was 7:45 on Saturday morning, and as far as I was concerned, everything was awesome. It was pouring with rain but it wasn’t too cold or windy. My knees felt good, my feet felt better and I was about fifteen minutes in to what seemed like it was going to be a fantastic 10k training run. I’m not going to pretend that it was a uniformly wonderful run or that I loved every minute of it. However, in this moment, (before my shoes filled up with water and my jacket got so heavy with rain that I had to take it off and run in my tank top, soaked to the bone) I was perfectly happy with the world.

Back when I started running, I had to be deluding myself if I had claimed to be loving it. When I couldn’t run more than thirty seconds without my heart bursting through my chest or my vision swimming, I knew full well that I was putting myself through a sick and masochistic form of torture. I was running to a goal, not for fun but for a proposed future career in the armed forces. I hated running. I hated being fat and slow and uncoordinated. I hated every single step.

I progressed. I got better at running. Thirty seconds, one minutes, five minutes, then twenty. I pushed myself further so I could feel hardcore, like a real athlete. I was still slow, still fat, still uncoordinated. But I told myself I was having a great time, and most of the time I believed it, even when the blisters on the back of my feet burst or my shin splints had me prostrate in agony for hours at a time. I told myself ‘this is awesome’ when I felt a cross between boredom and extreme self-hatred. I played my music really loud to drown out the tedium. I told myself it would at some point get fun.

It did. I’m not sure when it did. I think I’m still slow, although not as slow as I was. I’m not still fat, though. I dropped out of the ‘overweight’ designation some six months ago, at least. As for uncoordinated, I took up dancing so I still have the opportunity to feel unco whenever I want to. I ran my second City 2 Surf last month. I ran my first Half Marathon in May. I’m running a 10k fun run on Sunday, with the hope of breaking 60 minutes for the first time.

I think I’m having fun. Maybe I’ve just gotten so good at deluding myself that I can’t tell the difference any more. I would like to put it to the test, and on the weekend I decided on the perfect way of testing whether I actually do love this running business.

Next year in May, if the race is held and everything goes according to plan, I intend to run my first full Marathon. 42.2km, double the length of my longest run to date. I’m giving myself plenty of time to achieve this, so maybe I’ll go so far to aim for a time of less than five hours as well. We’ll see. If I could run a Half with only one training run a week, I’m confident that I can run a sub five hour marathon with three or four training runs a week. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I could even come in at four and a half hours. It’s exciting, it’s daunting, and it is (at a risk of overusing my favourite word) the most awesome thing I could think of to do before I turn 30 and officially become an old person.

I intend to document my progress here. So if you want to know how I’m going, stick around. It’s going to be a fun eight months or so. Depending on your definition of ‘fun’, that is.