One of my favorite commercials
these days is the one where there’s a guy driving a car and he doesn’t follow
the path the GPS voice (whose name is Mona in our house) tells him to. Mona
then says, ”recalculating.”
That’s what I’ve been doing the last
several months. I love running but I let it become too big of a part of my life,
to the point that I wasn’t looking for work as hard as I should have. I was
running my 20+ miles a week but neglecting this other thing to the point of making a mess of things. So I stopped running for about four months. Just stopped cold turkey.
I wouldn’t let myself get out there and have this bit of relaxation because of
my poor habits.
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| Note-- scale does not accurately reflect actual weight. |
My weight went from 167 to its current
level of 185. It’s a tiny bit harder to draw a deep breath, and my size
32-waisted jeans fit more snugly than they did last summer. It became time to
do something about my problem.
In the meanwhile, Astro our new
treadmill took up residence in our spare room last fall, next to the
not-unpacked boxes from our move in four years ago. This means I had to start
dealing with my problem. Can’t be having a big, expensive treadmill in the
house unless you’re gonna get on there. Astro and I have gotten acquainted—I can
set up routes in my old neighborhood in El Paso, Manhattan (The Little Apple), Tuscaloosa,
here in Athens, or wherever I want. I bang out about ten miles a week with the
elevation set at 1.0 so as to give my legs a little push. My mile times are
closer to 9:00, but I expect that since I’m carrying extra weight.
It’s about an hour and a half each
week, which jives with something I saw in a recent Runner’s World. It said that
if you start running 1-2 hours a week you slash your risk of dying of cancer or
a cardiovascular condition. The next page says 2 ½ hours a week will help you
reap all of the youth-promoting benefits.
My whole mindset started with a
magic number of 20 miles a week that I read years ago, so I’m adjusting my
mindset again to allow myself the chance to run about 3 times a week, a little
more than 30 minutes a shot, for a total of roughly 11 miles. I’m giving myself
permission not to run. This allows me more time to network, write cover
letters, and do the things I should have been doing before.
Who knows, maybe by clearing up the
job situation, my running life will improve because I can run during the time I
would’ve used job hunting. Or it could be that the reverse is true, that by
running less I achieve more by having more energy throughout the day. We’ll
find out.
Recalculating…
