Today’s post is a guest post by Dawn. You can find her on her blog at www.runningatdawn.com and on twitter @runningdawnie. If you would like to share your story, you can message me on twitter @daddyruns_com or just leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you.
I really wish I had some sort of inspiring story behind why I started running, but in all honesty? I don’t. It’s hard to remember why I started running other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” All it took was a trip to a shopping mall where I spied fliers for a local 5K in a running shoe store. I’d never run a 5K in my life. I’d never even considered running a 5K in my life, but for some reason, at that moment, something in my brain said, “I’m going to do this. Just to see if I can.” So I bought a pair of shoes and started running.
I started with one mile runs around my apartment complex and had gotten up to just under 2 miles by the time race day rolled around. When I lined up at the start line, I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to make it the whole 3 miles. In fact, I spent most of the race convinced I was going to die. I made it, though. I even ran most of the way and was insanely proud of my time, despite the fact that it wasn’t even remotely speedy. That didn’t matter. I had run 3.1 miles and I wanted to do it again. I was hooked.
That 5K turned into a couple more and sometime during the summer of 2004, a friend convinced me to run a half marathon with her in January of 2005. I figured that I had six months to train for it, which made it seem like a perfectly good idea. Unfortunately, about two months before the race I changed jobs and moved to a different state. Between the new job and my longer commute, my training totally fell apart and I lined up at the start line feeling completely unprepared. Once again, I spent most of that race thinking I was going to die, but somehow I managed to finish it. If you had asked me at mile 12 if I wanted to run another half? I would have said, “absolutely not.” By the time I crossed the finish line, though, I was having different thoughts altogether.
See, I knew I’d gone into that race somewhat undertrained, but I’d finished it anyway. So my brain started working, presenting the logic that if I could survive a half on suboptimal training, I could most certainly run a full if I actually trained for it. I ran my first full marathon that October and while my finish time wasn’t all that impressive, it didn’t matter. I’d made it and I wanted to do it again. Somewhere, between that first 5K and the marathon two years later, I’d become a runner. The question was no longer, “Am I going to run another race?” Now it was, “When am I going to run my next race?”
If you had told me 10 years ago that this is who I would become, I would have asked you what you were smoking. Now I can hardly imagine a life without running and hope that I’ll still be doing it 10, 20, or even 30 years from now. All because I decided one day to run a 5K. Just to see if I could.
