Me, an Athlete?
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
I’ve never thought of myself as an athlete. I mean, you take one look at me and it’s obvious that I’m the “bookish” type. In addition to being a four-eyes, I spend my time doing ridiculously nerdy things: reading, the arts, (easy) crossword puzzles, attending Star Trek theme parties (just kidding about that last one).
The sports that I love (i.e., baseball, baseball and baseball) are much better when I’m observing them rather than actually playing them. While I certainly could do serious damage if someone handed me a bat, it most likely would be a result of it slipping out of my hands during a swing and knocking someone unconscious. Hypothetical situation, of course.
My point is that I’ve never identified with the jocks. They were the elite, the untouchables. Somehow I’d missed the memo (or the genes) allowing some to effortlessly join teams, squads and scrums. Even when I played basketball in junior high, I didn’t identify myself as an athlete. And I carried this outdated definition of myself around with me all the way through college.
Then, last summer, something shifted. I stumbled (literally) into running. It started with 15 seconds here and there, usually followed by about 15 minutes of recovery — trust me, it was not a pretty sight. But I reminded myself over and over again that I was already doing more than some 60 percent of Americans, and that something was better than nothing. So I kept going.
Day after day, I put on my running shoes, read everything I could get my hands on, customized a training program, and started to learn the lingo (fartlek? Seriously?).
After about three months of wheezing through intervals around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis, I started to fall in love with running. If I didn’t run, it felt like something was missing from my day. I was able to run further, with a lower heart rate, than I’d ever gone before.
And I started to get annoyed when people (usually my mother) asked how “jogging” was going. Could you be more patronizing? I’d usually bite my tongue and respond “Running is great.” (John Bingham wrote a great column about the distinction in Runner’s World a few months back.) This minor (you might argue silly) irritation clued me into something, though: Somehow, mystery of all mysteries, I had become an athlete.
Now, I’m training for my first 5K, and rest assured I’ll bore you with the details as that progresses. Through this all, I’ve found that taking ownership of my sport keeps me moving toward my goals. What a huge difference it makes to declare that I am, in fact, a runner — no matter what my mom may call it (love you Mom!).
