Running

I’ve written before about yoga and the lovely, mesmerizing happy place it brings me to.

I don’t have the time for yoga at the moment. Nor do I have the cash to flow lovingly from my strong, sweaty, newly well-aligned palm into that of the teacher’s enlightened, lavender smelling palm.

I need something, however. For my figure. For my mood. For myself. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. What’s cheap — no, free — and fast?

I spoiled the riddle by naming the post running, didn’t I?

I’m doing a low-commitment program called Couch to 5K.

Special props to my friend Suzanne, who is my new go-to for information downloads. She told me about the running program, right before she told me about a special kind of lime pie on a stick, covered with chocolate, called a Swingle. So thank you Suzanne! (And, what are you trying to do to me, Suzanne??)

I didn’t get one of the pies yet but I have been running a few times a week. Well, the program dictates that you run a few times, and I think that the definition of “few” is three, right? Whereas the definition of “couple” is two. So let’s say that I’ve been running a couple of times per week.

When I say running, I mean jogging.

And when I say jogging, you start with walking and jogging intervals.

Many people do this with their smartphone, with an app interrupting whatever you are listening to with a tone. However, my smart phone doesn’t have a recent enough operating system to use the app. I’m also nervous at the prospect of being relieved of my smartphone by a ne’er-d0-well, as my mother would put it. Scared of being mugged, is what she means. So instead I’d borrow my husband’s watch and look at it the whole time.

Jogging is pretty easy when you’re distracted looking at a watch and trying to do math. But I soon grew out of the intervals and now I just jog a particular distance, or in the case of this morning, when I went to the gym, I did it for a particular time, which was 30 minutes of uninterrupted jogging. At the gym, I listen to Ted Talks or podcasts from The Moth.

Out in the wild, I focus on nature, or, more likely, real estate.

I’m really enjoying it, and it makes me less mean, and I’m moving in the right direction.

Must go stretch!