For Six Years I have had a love/hate relationship with running. Last Night was officially my first year of running continuously and I did three minutes faster then what I ran last year. Running has been an outlet of sorts for me. It gives me time to get outside, let everything go in pounding my feet into the concrete, about making myself faster and stronger every day, and just being thankful that I even had the two legs to do this sport. Starting out in running was so hard. In the beginning I was running a thirteen minute pace. It felt like eons when I started and I hated every second of going outside and actually doing it. I tried so hard to continue and to make it a regular course of my daily life but I eventually stopped and thought it wasn’t for me. The problem with stopping is seeing someone else you live with do it. They go out there time after time and still commit to the sport, no matter how hard it was the last time they went out. 

My dad used to weight heavier and one of the ways to get rid of the weight was to do a low carb based diet along with the running. Ultimately that was what saved my Dad from running into a lot of trouble with this health and I knew when I was younger that I was on the heavier side for my age. I had a baby face, I become uneven in all the wrong spots, I had a long awkward stage with myself, and I could never eat healthy. For the life of me, I cant. Yet, that continuous cycle of seeing my dad losing the weight, being happier and healthier and going through the pain and rewards made me cycle back to trying again and for years I did this. I would get at an ok pace and then when I thought I did enough, I stopped running on a regular basis. Quickly that backfired and it would get hard again and I would stop. 

Then I decided to start timing myself. When I was in middle school I had timed myself a few times and I hated it. I couldn’t stop looking at the watch and seeing how slow I was. How hard it was to get faster and how it hurt so bad to breathe while running. All that I was doing, all the hard work didn’t get me very far in a quick time and I found that frustrating. But here were are years later, an adult and just wanting to see results. So, I bought a vivoactive and started to get serious. At first it was hard to not look at it. Its big, its flashy, new, you want to see how it works and watch it as it moves. So crazy how something so simple can take your attention span away. For weeks it was hard to adjust to the idea of wearing a watch. The more I wore it though and saw the results, the more I loved the idea of having this handy device. 

Now, it is a way for me to see how I am achieving my goals, how long it takes for me to progress, when I run more and when I run less. It’s nice to have that chart to see more about....well about yourself. How you perform and progress is how we get better as humans and it is also what strives us. When we achieve a goal we strive for a higher on. Once we beat that goal, we move to a larger scale. We keep going until we deiced enough is enough or we go all the way and set new records or try to until our bodies no longer can do the sport itself. 

Running and Soccer are two sports that I have enjoyed doing and one is six years in the making. I hope to continue to do this sport and that I will be motivated to keep trudging onward. Its a very difficult sport that requires a lot from the mind and body. Not everyone is a runner and I will say that it takes so much time to move up in times and to get good at it. You have real good days where you are super-fast and then you have bad days where your slower than normal and it could be from the tiniest of things. 

So Happy Anniversary to me and cheers too many more.