Overly Flexible

Don't we look intimidating.

"I wasn't good enough or crazy enough for that nonsense!" God must have laughed when I used to think such things.

I had been running fairly consistently since 2014. A few times I had made it to 5 miles, but typically I stayed at the 3 mile mark. In August of 2017, along with a few friends, I ran in my one and only 5K, Carthage and Webb's Rival Run. (Teacher friends, if you ever want to challenge yourself, sign-up for a race that falls on the Saturday of the first week back to school! Who planned that date??) Needless to say, my friend Brianna and I even made it in the Joplin Globe. Purely coincidence, she was wearing blue and I red. The journalist thought it made for a good story. Little did she know, Brianna was walking it with her Carthage crew, and I was jogging it with a couple Cardinals. Certainly not a cut-throat rivalry story! The thought of being in the Globe as runners, gave us a good laugh though.

Rivalry Run with Tim and Beth

For the most part, I was content running on my own. Like I said yesterday, if I'm going to do something, I want to be good at it. I will never consider myself a good runner, so I had to change my mindset. Instead of trying to be better than anyone else, I started competing against myself. Sometimes that meant running farther than the run before, other times it meant cutting a few seconds off of my previous time, and often it meant just motivating myself to get out there.

I think I was commonly running 2-3 times a week. Winter would usually slow me down and side-line me, because running in itself takes motivation. I'm not sure what running in the cold takes, pure insanity, maybe? I would take advantage of warmer winter days and pick it back up consistently in the Spring.

Then came October 2018. The arch of my foot started throbbing. It would wake me up in the middle of the night and at school I looked like the student who fake limps for attention. I'd stop running for a few days, ice my foot, and go out and try again. It became a vicious cycle. I just wanted to run and be healthy and destress. Is that too much to ask? Apparently, because I found myself at a podiatrist with arch supports. Old shoes, an overly flexible foot, and too quickly increasing mileage was a very poor (idiotic... stubborn...) decision on my part. Aside from costing me a pretty penny, it also cost me 3 months of running (winter didn't help that either).

When the first warm day of 2019 finally came in February, my arch supports and I were back to the races. Well, we were back to the streets and racing against myself at least. Hmm. Maybe I was, possibly, kind of, sort of, slowly becoming a runner.