Becoming a Runner: Baby Steps

I distinctly remember the first day I realized that I could be a runner…dare I clarify, a distance runner.

15 years ago, when I was in my 7th grade Physical Education class.

Of course, being a distance runner back then meant something much different (i.e. shorter) than it does to me now, and of course even shorter than 2-mile high school cross country races.

In middle school, running a mile seemed forever long. Like it was the longest fathomable distance to run. Every day for P.E. we were sent off on one loop around the soccer field and school grounds (at very most the equivalent of one-third of a mile), and we were timed for that damned one-mile run probably once a month.

I hated running. My older sister was just a year ahead of me in school and had always loved running. She voluntarily signed up to race those Hershey’s track meets in elementary school. I thought she was nuts. Sure, I loved running around playing freeze tag and kickball but anything longer than 50 yards was painful. I hadn’t yet learned how to pace myself and had hardly any endurance. That required patience, and that was not me.

So Ms. Halliday, our P.E. teacher, would send us off, and I would always run as hard as I could for as long as I could (not very far really) and like most of my classmates, stop and walk the rest of the way once I (quickly) grew tired. One day I asked myself hey…what if you kept going when you got tired? What if you actually pushed through the discomfort? How fast could you go? How many other kids could you beat? Well, that day, I surprised myself. I held back a bit at the beginning of the loop. I made myself keep going when it hurt. And sure I slowed down a bit towards the end, but I continued to run all the way back to the start/finish line, finishing with the first 10 kids who had always actually run the whole distance.

If I remember clearly, I am pretty sure there was some kind of incentive: Ms. Halliday would give extra credit points to the first 5 girls and boys (always the geek, I was) and this prompted my valiant attempt at becoming a “distance” runner. I continued to run the whole one-third mile loop (damn, that seems short doesn’t it?!) each day during P.E. and found that it got easier each time. Running the mile around campus each month got easier as well, and my times continued to drop. At the end of the year, I even tried out for the track team and made a few events (the half-mile and mile). Unlike high school 2 years later, we actually had try-outs for track, so not everyone made the team.

I grew to love running (dare I clarify, distance running) and it became as essential a part of my life and well-being as the air I breathe. In high school, my favorite T-shirt declared, “A day without running….pretty much sucks.” These days I moonlight as an endurance triathlete and it’s not unusual for me to log a couple of 15-mile training runs each week. It’s now my sister who thinks that I’m nuts. Over the years, I’ve been approached by non-athletes or newbies just getting into running, and I always hear the same things: “I just can’t run that long.” “I would get so bored.” “I hate running.” “I could never do it.” “I just don’t have any endurance.” “The only way you can get me to run is if I was being chased by the police/a dog/my psychotic ex-girlfriend.”

Well, I will be the first to tell you that nobody is born with endurance. Nobody just wakes up one morning and runs a marathon nonstop with zero training (at least not without surviving unscathed–there was that one episode of How I Met Your Mother…). We may be equipped with the physiological machinery to run longer distances but this “endurance” concept…it has to be built upon. It’s okay and absolutely normal to start out easy, to start out baby steps at a time. I, too, hated running. As a middle schooler, I never imagined that sticking out that daily one-third mile loop would become my own baby steps to someday running a marathon (preceded a 6-hour swim/bike warm-up; I haven’t actually done a standalone marathon). I think my 12-year-old self’s head would implode at the thought of running a 5k! Imagine that–if one mile seemed forever long, three of those back-to-back were surely impossible!

We all have to start out somewhere, and all experienced runners will tell you, it gets easier. It always hurts when you are starting out as a newbie, and even seasoned veterans experience the pain of getting back into shape after taking some time off due to an injury or off season. But once you get over that hurdle, you may find that you too will fall in love with running.

Jocelyn Wong is an avid endurance athlete and guest writer for MadeToRun. She has been running semi-competitively for the past 15 years and began racing triathlons in 2000, specializing in the Ironman distance. She is a development athlete for a professional triathlon team, teamTBB, and is based in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Southeast Asia. She works as a prosthetist-orthotist when not swimming, biking, or running, and is involved with organizing prosthetic missions in developing countries. You can find more information about her on her personal website and triathlon blog.

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