Running is Weird

So I decided something: Running is strange.

When I am going through a running dry spell and try to go for a run for the first time in awhile I realize running is HORRIBLE!! Ultimately I come to the same conclusion: anyone choosing to run is clearly a Masochist. (that comment was for you Britany) Running is painful and hard and horrible and when you haven't done it for awhile you feel awful afterwards and it feels like you're 2/3 dead and the part that isn't dead is yelling silent profanities in your head about how you're a glutton for pain and "shouldn't you be sleeping or at least eating something with sugar in it instead of putting yourself through self-induced torture?" I would also stare shamelessly at the hard core runners with the water bottle belts and think: "They clearly hate happiness."

If you can trick yourself into getting past that first week of awfulness and run sporadically, I feel like you get into the second stage of weird. Its that stage that running is NOT fun, but its kind of like a game. Like "Oh you ran 10 minutes, well (condescending laugh)... I ran 11 minutes on a .05 incline so I guess we know who the real winner of life is." and you give yourself weird goals... like "I can't go to bed until I've ran around the block 3 times." and although you're not making any real leaps in athletic ability, your brain tells you that you're a monster freakin champion. It is also in this stage that if you skip a few days and then run a few days later your body makes you feel like you haven't skipped a beat and you run like you've never ran before... and then the second day you feel like you're going to have to be scraped off of your bed... running is weird.

The weirdest stage is the next stage... If you stay with it and actually gain some real "running muscles" (biological scientific term), you enter this world that people only read about but never really understand unless you've been there. Running turns from this necessary evil into something closer to a euphoric rush. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN??? One minute you're plotting how to kill the family cat of the inventor of the treadmill, and the next you have Lisa Frank characters jumping through your head while you're jamming to J. Beibs on a 5 mile run. RUNNING IS WEIRD!!!

So, I went on my morning run and I was just trotting along thinking about how much I love to run... which is WEIRD since I've always thought runners had no grasp on reality.

{Let's have an honesty moment real fast though (I don't have a grasp on reality)... I thought this morning I was zooming... I figured I probably ran 4 miles since I'm super fast (like unto a gazelle) and in my head I run 8 minute miles when in reality I ran 11 minute miles ... so obviously I'm barely clinging to real life events}

REGARDLESS of how fast I run, somewhere along the line RUNNING BECAME FUN?! I don't know how this happens... I think the bottom line is running is weird.

(hiking is way better always)