Running

About a month ago, my boyfriend and I decided that we were going to run. We've both got jobs that make us sit still in chairs for the better part of 8 hours a day, and although we cycle to work, we had the feeling that our physical conditions were not what they used to be when we were students (and usually went for a long walk 3-4 days a week). To cover the same distances in less time, running seemed to be the solution.
Now I had done some running about 5 years ago, using the famous and fabulous program called 'Evi', in which a friendly Flemish lady tells you when to start and stop running. This kind of interval training was very effective, and in just a couple of weeks I could run 5 k in one go. Sadly, Evi requires you to run 3 days a week, if at all possible the same 3 days every week. This is easily done when you're a student with only 9 hours of classes every week, but not so when you've got a job that requires you to have meetings until 21:00 at night on various days of the week.
So we set our goal a bit lower: 2 days a week, usually Tuesday and Thursday, as those are generally meeting-free days. We found a nice  little loop to run, cutting through some fields and next to a canal, with a rail bridge thrown in for some altitude training. We both don't own any proper sporting clothes, apart from running shoes, so we put on some loose-fitting clothes from our DIY jobs on the house. And so we ran.

It is amazing how quickly you loose your stamina if you don't keep it up. After only the shortest possible space of running, I was huffing and puffing and bright red in the face, with my feet and legs begging me to stop and just go walk like any normal person would. This was to be expected. The annoying thing is that you know you're going to have to start out that way, and that it will take a couple of weeks before things will get better. It's so easy to stop and just think 'running is not my thing' and leave it at that.
But I kept at it, and we've done some nice sessions of interval training, lenghtening the period we run and shortening the walking period each time. We've also added another traffic bridge to our course, one which is steeper and therefore harder. Our pace is not very high, and we're not covering any great distances or training for any specific goal, but it still feels like we're doing something good, for both body and mind.

You often hear people talk about a 'runner's high'. I too have several colleagues who run marathons and are skinnier than should be humanly possible, who are always going on about 'the zone'  etc. Now I don't know about that, maybe I should be running more and longer, but I've never had that endorphin like experience. What I do feel, however, is that my thoughts tend to go more quiet and organized as I run. After getting home from a stressful 10 hour work day in which nothing went as expected and I am feeling like 'I should jump behind a computer and fix this right now, right this minute!', running is liberating. Your mind concentrates on just one thing (well, maybe two, as controlling my breathing seems to take up a large chunk of mental activity too), and when you're done you have this nice relaxed feeling of simplicity: take a shower, eat, don't work, just sit still and do nothing. Counting Crows tells us in their song Hard Candy: Time expands and then contracts, and that is exactly how it works for me: the running seems to go on forever, in a void somewhere, and when you get home you discover that hardly any time has passed, that you still have a whole evening ahead of you, and that your mind is now magically cleared.

So yes, I think we will try to keep up the running for quite some while to come. As long as our progression remains as slow as it is, it won't go eating up more time than it should, given the benifits we want to gain from it. We don't want to become the uber fit, overly competitive marathon type, we just want to be healthy, happy, and relatively stress-free.

PS: The Oatmeal wrote a series of comics about running great distances, and although I recognize very little of his story (he does ultra runs in mountains, I clomp away at city pavements) it is still an interesting read.