How that's going

You might remember that for Christmas, I got running shoes. And then I surprised nobody more than myself by using them, not just once, but on a fairly regular basis. I decided to sign up for the nursery-school fundraiser 5k race in May, thinking that surely almost five months was enough time for anyone to get themselves from zero to five.

The race is next Saturday. Just in case things don't go well for me on the day, I went for a run last Saturday and beat my previous personal best by a whole mile, bringing me nicely up to 3.25 miles altogether. Which just happens to be a shade over 5k, so whatever happens on the day will be a mere technicality.

My aim has been three times a week, or two runs and one something else, like that dance exercise class I was doing. I certainly haven't been faithful to that aim ever since January, between travel and illness and (even) injury (I twisted my ankle quite painfully in the playground two weeks ago; not exactly a training injury, more an occupational hazard); but I've kept it up, and for some reason I haven't wanted to stop.

It's been encouraging, too, to find that when I do stop for a week - or three - my body bounces back to where it was before much more quickly than it took to get there in the first place. So I might go out the first day and run less than a mile before limping home, disconsolate;  but I can add back the distance half a mile or more at a time. Muscle memory is a wonderful thing.

I'm not a shadow of my former self or anything. I don't think I've lost so much as a pound after all this, but then it's not as if I've been laying off the muffins either. Perhaps the reason I keep going this time is because for once it's not about weight-loss, though of course that would be nice; it's really about being healthy. I want to show my children that everyone exercises, not just Daddy the marathon man, and I need to find a new normal for myself that includes regular movement further than from kitchen table to couch, or around the aisles of Target. And it would be nice to go (ever closer) towards my 40s as a woman who could, perhaps, outrun the zombie uprising, so long as the zombies can't run any further than three miles at a nice leisurely 12- or 13-minute-mile pace.

(To put my wussiness in perspective, my husband got up at 3 a.m. the other week, with a headcold, went out in the dark, and took a bus with a bunch of strangers to run 26.2 miles up the California coast, just for fun, in under four hours. And here I am worried that if Mabel has a less-than-stellar night I might not be able to go a whole 3.2 without having to stop and walk.

(Not that there's anything wrong with stopping and walking. It's just that once I stop it's immeasurably harder to start again, so I prefer to keep going.)

) <- end of digression. And other digression. Though if you can call it a digression when it comes at the end I'm not sure. Maybe it's just a tangent. Like this one.