Mieux Sauter
This morning I was (as usual) casting about for excuses to avoid running, and the best I could come up with was a generally unsettled feeling in my stomach, and of course my general disinclination to run.
At about two-thirds of my mile, though, my legs were feeling limber and I wasn’t entirely winded, so I shook loose and took two or three actual running steps*, the kind I see other people doing and have not yet myself been able to accomplish. Not, that is, till this morning! Now, that used up so much energy and oxygen that I couldn’t keep up my usual pace thereafter, much less the springy running pace I had just attained — but a few real running steps is more than I had been able to reach up to now. And taking even just a few running steps improved my overall time to 10:24, a nice step forward.
Still plenty of work to do on my breathing/oxygenation — I’m the world’s gasping-est runner — but I do see progress, and that’s enough for me to continue running despite my deep visceral repulsion from this exercise.
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* By ‘running’ here I mean that sort of step wherein your thigh rises above my typical jogging-y angle (just a little different from a walking step, only taken a bit faster).