Today's Reason to Go On 1/4: The Long Run

Again with the waiting until after midnight to post and the feeling like I have to mention it because this has the feel of a daily piece but I doubt I will get to it daily and don't want to set myself up for failure, but really want to just use this an as excuse to write original content that won't be filtered through facebook (as if getting filtered through weebly and whoever your ISP is tons better) and will be a reason for you to keep coming back to this website, which will ostensibly good for me if I keep churning out art and telling you about it here!


Today's reason to go on - figure out just what the hell long distance running is and why I love it so.

Running is something I took up back last January to supplement the general weight loss/fitness routine that I'd implemented in order to finally be able to blame my depression and horrible self image on something other than my weight, general sloth, and self destructive tendencies. Turns out that doesn't work but I did discover something else. I enjoyed it, and I was good at it.

I'd like to write something longer about my experiences running but it's been hard for me so far to organize my thoughts about it. Thinking about my running year brings up so many images, thoughts, and emotions that just now I got sidetracked for a while thinking about it. I don't know if I should describe the particular runs that stand out to me (my second 5k, Christmas morning, my first failed loop of Central Park) or the particular defining moments, the good ones (the moment I decided to run to the GW bridge, the sprint at the end of my 1st 10k (and 2nd for that matter)) and the bad ones (the time I failed on my first GW run, the moment I turned back on Cat Hill that one freezing Sunday night). Do I start with the early days on the treadmill? I could talk about the transition from treadmill to outside. Where's the narrative? 

Until that time it remains, simply, a reason to go on. I'm running a half marathon, my first, on January 25, which will be one year to the day I quit smoking cigarettes. I'm running with a group now, Mondays (before Sidewalk) and Saturday mornings. A bunch of us want to do the Brooklyn Half in May. 
Our Saturday runs start with a warm up jog from Union Square to the river. There's always 12-25 people depending on the day and by the time we reach the river people have fallen into packs based on pace and intended mileage. Today the pack I run with all came in sort of itching to do a long run. We were feeling really good around the 3 mile mark and went for it. The result is the run you see above. Which was great. And sort of... easy? which is weird to say but sort of true. I felt almost like I should keep going. 
And this is after the run I did yesterday, a hard eight miles including the loop of Central Park. I should have been tired and run down today. But it does't really work like that. In some ways, the complete opposite is true. It gets easier every day. It, like in so many things, is hard to begin.