Before I give a re-cap of my past year of running, how about some background on why I started running? I absolutely used to hate running! My wife would run and would run races with her friends and I never saw the point. I never enjoyed it. I would try from time to time to go out with her, but it wasn't fun. My wife continued running up until she couldn't with the pregnancy of our first baby; then she just got started back in the groove when we found out she was pregnant with baby #2 who is now 7 months old.
Then I decided to take charge of my fitness and started P90X in January 2012. I loved it and got fairly good results, but not quite the results I was looking for. I could see improvement in the definition of my muscles, but I had a certain body fat percentage goal in mind. I couldn't break that plateau so I turned to the internet to figure out what I could do. Turns out running would be the best way to burn those calories. Ugh!
I took off for my first run and it wasn't too bad. Then I started to see the results I was looking for. Then I surpassed my goal for body fat percentage. If you know me, I am a pretty competitive guy. After a few weeks of running, I seemed to have caught the addiction. Then I kept challenging myself to run more distance, or faster pace, or both. It became fun. The challenge made it fun. Then I signed up for my first races. That was what hooked me. It gave me a reason to run (train) and a way to test myself. I like the obstacle course races (OCRs) the best, but I also like the road runs as well.
Abby has just now started getting back into the swing of running and is limited (per doctor's orders) to the number of miles she can run for now. I look forward to running as a family in the near future. Too bad I didn't put more effort into it earlier, but it will be fun going forward!
So that is the back story of how I got started into running. I think it is one of those things I had to start and try for myself rather than others. Now I am pretty much addicted as long as I have an event to train for and work towards.
Here is a quick summary of my first year of running:
Over the past year: 135 runs with an average distance of 5.6 miles per run. My average pace was a 7'52" mile. I spent a total of 100 hours and 11 minutes running and ran a total of 764.48 miles. That is crazy for me to think about and comprehend, but pretty cool to know that I accomplished all that.
And because I am such a geek, here is the analysis by month:
Here are the milestones (according to Nike+) that I have accomplished over the year:
Here are the events that I have completed over the past year and how I finished:
I never would have thought these words would come out of my mouth but... I really enjoy running. In addition to using running for my health and fitness, it is also my main source of stress relief. The pavement takes a lot of punishment from the things that stress me out in life. It sounds silly, but I feel like I am an overall happier person because of running and my fitness activities. I hope this is something that I keep up and that I can share and enjoy with my family as we grow.
That's it for now, until next time blogosphere...
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