Hate is a strong word

Now, I know hate is a strong word and one that I rarely use, if ever. It's an ugly word , I just generally don't like that word at all. Except when I use it to describe how I feel about running. I hate running. I've never been very good at it and I've never found that calming feeling of strength and solace after running five miles to "blow of some steam" or to get "balanced" out after a long hard day. People who choose to run after a hard day confuse me. Doesn't that make your day harder? More painful? Don't you just want to curl up with a good book or movie? Or better yet, get a massage? These are questions that I've decided to explore as I force myself to do the unimaginable - start running. I have the usual goals of weight loss, fitness and personal accomplishment in mind but even more intriguing to me are runners themselves and what happens when a bunch of them get together. People who actually enjoy the sport and do it - gulp - for fun.

The idea for this blog came to me during my second 5K - the ScopeItOut 5K for Colon Cancer. While my motives are selfish - get in shape (after surgery last year) and weight loss - I realized around mile 2 that I was running with a group of 2000 people on a rainy Sunday morning. Who in their right mind would:

a) cut your night short on Saturday?
b) wake up early on Sunday?
c) take the metro at 7 a.m. to start running from a different location?
d) run in the rain?

There were people of all sizes, shapes, ages and ethnicites. It was amazing! More on this particular 5K in a subsequent post.

So, as a result of this experience and my sudden fasination with all-things running, I've set out to do one 5K/month for one year - various 5K's for charity, races, "fun runs," mud runs and any other kind you can imagine. It's not exactly an enourmous goal in the grand scheme of goal setting but it's big for me.

Will Smith once said that to be successful in life you need to learn how to do two things: Write and Run. Here's to testing his theory.