Selena
Mileage/Time: 42 min.
Like Michelle, I'm focusing on time, not distance. My feet, my knees, my hamstrings aren't used to this kind of aerobic strain, so my first step is getting up their endurance. I did this by doing a pseudo interval run: I briskly walked for 4 min, jogged for 10, trotted for 4, jogged for 10, trotted for 4, jogged for 10, and then had a 5 min cool down of more brisk walking. It seemed to work out well. My knee isn't pissed at me--though that could change once the lactic acid starts swarming around the surrounding muscles. My feet, on the other hand, fared less well: I've got a wicked blister on my arch. I guess that'll just be part of the endurance training, though. It'll soon probably morph into a callous and I won't feel a thing anymore. Ah, well. Cute, sassy, strappy sandals be damned...
Another thing I found myself focusing on was my form. Due to my propensity for slouching, I often find myself slackening my core muscles and hunching over as I run. This, in turn, causes my knees to knock inwards and my foot-strike to be towards my toes. By concentrating on keeping my abs tight, I find everything else falls into place, and then I have that moment, when I look at the trail ahead and my entire body feels bio-mechanically "slick," like anyone who happened to see me would really be convinced that I'm a runner. "Geez," they'd say as I cruised by, "that person's a runner! Like, whoa..."
While I couldn't keep up that glorious moment for the entire run, I found I could keep it going for longer than I had before. And it's that goal of maintaining proper, healthy form for the whole run, of feeling like your body isn't a jumbled up bunch of joints and muscles and sinews but is, instead, a perfectly tuned up machine--that's what keeps me going. Because once I stop (thinking I'm just too busy or just too tired), having to start up again brings me back to the beginning of the whole herky-jerky process.
