It’s hard to start over. I think we’ve all been there, where something we took for granted sneaks out the back door in a worn pair of running shoes when you aren’t paying attention.
Something about the last few years made me forget I used to think working out was fun, or at least tolerable. Sure, we take the dogs for walks around the neighborhood and do the occasional hike through the forest, but our pace is leisurely.
The too-long-ago CrossFit class haunts me when I’m hauling landscaping rocks and bags of dirt from the local home store out to the car. It used to be easy to lift 50 pounds. When did I lose my physical fitness?
I’m a fan of downhill running, but I have yet to find a course that skips the uphill parts. I’ve been known to run down Copper Basin and call Mike from the Safeway parking lot to pick me up, grabbing an iced coffee while I wait for him, a delicious reward for bad behavior.
It’s hard when you know you used to be better at something and you suspect you could probably be almost as good in the future, but you’re stuck wading through the middle of “not quite there yet.” That’s how I feel these days when I click the start button on the fancy treadmill at the Y and start punching up the speed. It takes a few minutes to convince my knees and ankles that we are actually doing this. It takes a few more minutes for my lungs to agree.
And just when all my body parts are giving me the go-ahead, my brain starts whispering, “you used to run faster” and “this was your warm-up pace a few years ago.”
Luckily, my heart doesn’t care how fast I run and it tells my brain to shut up and watch the guy on the TRX suspension straps doing an amazing job at one-handed push-ups instead. Wow, now that’s a fitness goal, I think, and before I know it, I’ve found a song on my playlist that seems to work just fine with the pace I’m running now and my feet magically keep moving forward on their own.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, the saying goes, but sometimes our brains try to protect us from failure by convincing us we shouldn’t even try. I think that’s what happened this year when I made a New Year’s resolution to run a half-marathon in June and proceeded to barely train at all.
As the race got closer, I realized the odds of me being able to run that far were getting slimmer. Finally, I had to accept that my half-marathon goal was now just a nice charitable donation and I wouldn’t be part of that race.
But instead of tossing my shoes in the back of the closet forever, I signed up for a slightly more achievable 10K goal and am actually showing up at the gym a few times each week. When Oct. 14 rolls around, I’ll be standing on Whiskey Row, chilly and nervous, but excited to be back on track. The people around me will have their own reasons for getting up early on a Saturday morning to race up and down the streets of Prescott. I might even ask a few of them about it as we walk together up the dreaded hills of Hassayampa, admiring the folks who fly past us determined not to slow down and catch their breath.
At the end of the race, whether we walk or run, we’ll be cheering each other on to make it across the finish line. That’s what truly matters — in running and in life.
Prescott-area resident Kelly Paradis is a community liaison for Good Samaritan Hospice and Marley House. She loves listening to and writing stories about life.