I've started jogging. Shut up, I have too! Inspired by Manoah, I was going to dig my bicycle out of the garage and start riding it on the weekends, now that the temperature has (or had, at any rate) dipped to a comfortable level. But then on Saturday morning I learned that a bicycle that's been sitting neglected for over a year + no tire pump = not going very far. So, all dressed down to get some exercise and feeling equally inspired by Pamie and her recent marathon run*, I set out to jog.
Well, to walk. At first. But with the goal of eventually jogging at some point totally in mind. Not really ever having been a runner, or a jogger (I've jogged before, but only short distances and only to jack my heart-rate up during my walks), I'm possessed of enough common sense to know that you have to work up to these things. So I started out slow. The street on which I live joins up with the street behind in a big curve, to make a convenient track-like circle, one lap of which is almost exactly one-third of a mile. So I walked slowly for a lap to warm up. Then I picked up some weights and sped up to power-walk the second lap, because power-walking is what I know. On the third lap, I chucked the weights and jogged for a hundred steps. Then I walked the next hundred, then jogged another hundred, and so on for an entire lap. I didn't die. I thought for a minute that I might be about to, but I got past it, and walked a fourth and final cool-down lap, and then got up and did the whole thing over again on Sunday. And it was all right.
I know I'll never run a marathon, or probably even a 5K, because I know I'll never be dedicated enough to get up at the butt crack of dawn to put my running shoes on and go train. So I considered letting that be the end of it. But then last night when I got home from work, Matt was online, and the evening had cooled off, and I figured as long as I had time to kill I might as well go do it again. And as I walked my last lap I figured that if I keep doing this on the weekends, and then squeeze it in one night a week, at least as long as it's not freeze-your-extremities-off cold outside, I'll probably be able to stay in shape through the holidays. Maybe get into better shape, even. So I guess that makes me a jogger now. Or it will, after I work up to jogging more than one-third of one-third of a mile.
I've signed up for NaNoWriMo. I just did it about an hour ago. I had no idea that there were, like, local groups and meet-ups and stuff. A Tulsa meet-up and kick-off party is being planned for the last Saturday of the month, but that weekend is the anniversary of my first date with Matt, and he's still enough of a romantic to want to keep celebrating it, so I suspect that I have a date that night. Unless he decides he'd rather celebrate it on Sunday, which is the actual anniversary anyway. But at any rate, I now have some measure of external accountability to produce writing. Whether it will make a difference remains to be seen, but at least it's there.
* Running isn't the only thing Pamie has inspired me to do lately. Out of curiosity, I picked up her first novel, Why Girls Are Weird, to read on the cruise. Which I did. And it was good. There were parts of the book that made me want to be a writer. It was good timing, seeing as how I had already promised myself that I would start writing again when I got home; but reading this book made me actually look forward to getting to write again. I should probably write to her to tell her so, but I always feel oogy when I try to write fan letters and always end up trashing them before they get sent. I suppose I should just view her as a fellow blogger who wrote a story that deserves some feedback, which she is, but she's also more than that: she's a blogger who made good, and that makes her something of a hero, and that makes her a wee bit intimidating, and so I'll settle for telling you guys that you should totally go read her books, and I'll read her second one just as soon as I can get to the store and pick up a copy. Hopefully the second one will keep the inspiration going.
