Unathletic Me

I'm creating this blog for a number of reasons including monitoring my running, demonstrating that  anyone, even unathletic people like myself, can run and that everyone can make time to exercise. My plan is to write a blog for every run with stats, feelings that day, and how I managed to make time to run. In order to follow my blog, I think it's important to give a little background. Pardon me if this blog is all over the place, it's my first time writing one!

I'm a 31 year old mother who has been pretty inactive most of her life. I was chubby until I went to college and then managed to drop weight because my parents weren't feeding me all the time. I continued to lose weight after college by dieting and eating a lot of salads! I hardly went to the gym and really didn't have much activity at all. 

Enter Husband. He's a very active, fit  person. We went on hikes, went to the gym together, took yoga classes together, boxed together etc. I can't say that I increased my activity for him because if you knew my personality you would know that I don't do anything I don't enjoy doing. But I did learn that there were things that I liked to do that I had never done before. For one, I really enjoy hiking. I have two dogs and the fact that I can bring them with me and enjoy nature is wonderful. I have realized that I really don't enjoy using cardio equiment at the gym, I'd rather do something outside or take a class. Since my husband, boyfriend at the time, always had things to do after work - a jiu jitsu class or going to the gym, I found a need to find things I enjoyed as well. All my friends and I did in our early 20's was go to clubs and drink. So the fact that there was other things out there that I could enjoy completely threw me off. Thanks to my husband and his active after work lifestyle, I discovered that I absolutely love Bikram Yoga. For those of you who don't know, Bikram Yoga is yoga in 105 degrees. It's intense. You sweat from places you never knew existed! Despite not being very active, I was surprisingly pretty flexible. 

Though it may seem like I went from being inactive to active overnight, it's definitely not the case. I still had periods on long hikes, where I would throw down my hiking pack and tell my husband, this isn't who I am, that I'm a broadway show loving, take me to the city for dinner and drinks girl, not a girl who wears EMS hiking pants, a hoody and a hiking backpack! All that changed however as I realized there was nothing like being out in the woods with my husband and our two dogs.

Enter baby. I got pregnant about 9 months after we got married and now we have a very smiley 10 month old. I was active throughout my pregnancy, still went on hikes for the most part and attended a couple prenatal yoga classes. I gained a total of 26 pounds which I was very happy about. After my son was born, I realized how hard it was to lose weight. There was just no time. The weight came off pretty slow. I came home with a little over 10 pounds to lose and I recently managed to lose it all. You're probably thinking I exercised like crazy but I watched what I ate and got some exercise in when I could. The thing is that my body is very different now than before my pregnancy. I never had a flat stomach but it is far from that now. So a couple months ago, I decided I needed to do something about it. I started taking my son on runs in his jogging stroller. To my surprise, he absolutely loved it. He was smiling and making noise the entire time. I didn't really like it for the run, I liked it more because I was spending time with my son but after the run, I felt fantastic. I say run but really it was a jog. I was jogging at a 5 mph pace for a little over a mile. And it took me a couple times to get there. I started at a mile. 

Enter this blog. I had taken my son out in the jogging stroller about 5-6 times in the last 2 months and then he picked up something from daycare and we both got sick and that was that. The jogging was all forgotten. Two days ago, my friend liked Women's Running Magazine on facebook. I checked out the page and read an article about a mother who didn't start running until 28 and started by running just under a mile. A couple years later she is running marathons. I felt inspired. I realized that a lot of the time I was using my son as an excuse. Yes its hard to find time but if another mother could do it, I could. Yesterday, I read an article about a mother who has a 3 year old and another one on the way and how she's still running. Truly inspiring. So yesterday despite my "no time" and having to work, I managed to go for a run. My son was at daycare so I ran without the jogging stroller. I didn't run very long, only 1.19 miles but I did manage to run faster than I usually do, around 6 mph and my fastest speed was 10mph! I went from running a 10 minute mile to a 9 minute mile. I felt like I would throw up after my run but I was happy. 

This morning I woke up thinking that there's got to be other women out there like me. Women who read articles about people doing things and think that can't be me, I'm not athletic enough. Well this blog is me proving that we can do what we set our minds to. I'm not promising weight loss as that's not really my goal. My goal is to be consistent with running, be it solo or with my son in the jogging stroller and to increase my distance and speed. I want to one day run a 5K and if I could ever manage a half marathon, woohoo!

Until my next run,

Renita