I have had a bit of a personal revelation over the course of the last year around my personal fitness and decided to share it in this post.
So, the story begins with the completion of a 6 and a half mile run this morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and back to Brooklyn, across two extremely large bridges. It was not warm. In fact, it was freezing on the bridges.
The ironic thing about this seemingly not so interesting story is that a year ago, last February, if someone would have forced me to go for 6.5 mile run in the freezing cold I would have first laughed at them, and thereafter inquired on the state of their current mental condition. If that person would have actually gotten me to go (which I would put at 2%) , I would have most likely had some sort of major coronary health episode and ended up lying facedown on the cold, hard, slush covered pavement. An ambulance would have very likely been necessary. Well, OK, maybe I am exaggerating a bit but if I would have ran the exact same route this time last year that I ran this morning it would have royally sucked. At the time, I wouldn’t wish such a thing on my worst enemy.
Things started shifting for me when two of my best friends, Mike and Warner, somehow convinced me to participate in “The Tough Mudder” last November. “The Tough Mudder” is a 12 mile obstacle course/mud run decided by the British Special Forces. In addition to running the entire time, you climb over walls, crawl through tubes, labor your way through waist high mud, and swim across freezing cold rivers, among countless other obstacles. I was not going to do it at first, but caved in and signed up in the end without really knowing why. My very loose three part goal was to finish the course strong, without injury or death, and to have a lot of fun along the way. But, to make this a reality, I was forced to start a training regiment that I was far from used to. Eventually, I worked my way up to 15 miles runs, which is kind of funny as I have spent most of my life avoiding anything to do with running. I was surprised when I started to look forward to the training–and even more surprised to find that I was a pretty good runner.
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