No pain no gain

Running. I don’t know who decided it was a good idea, but I’m going to find out, and then I’m going to track them down and . . . well, best I don’t say anything incriminating.

I promised myself I’d go for a run today, finally get off my lazy butt and do some exercise. Instead, I lay in bed and ate an entire pizza on my own. My flatmate has been away all week and without her I feel next to no motivation to try be healthier.

As it neared evening a feeling of guilt came over me, and I decided I’d do it anyway. I’d still go for a run. The next 45 minutes were spent trying to make myself get off my bed and out the front door.

I started off at a light jog, feeling pretty good about myself. Then, about 30 seconds later, a stitch set in. ‘Ugh,’ I thought to myself miserably, ‘just reach the signpost in the distance.’

About halfway to the signpost, it started getting hard to breathe. You have to understand, I am not a fit person. I know you see people who look a normal weight and think they’re just being annoyingly modest when they say they’re unfit, but for me it’s the truth. I may not look like a fat person, but I am one where it counts: inside.

By the time I reached that signpost – and I had to break into a sprint to get there before my body gave up on me – I could barely breathe. Now, as I’ve already said in an indirect way, I do not run very much, but the feeling I experienced when I stopped at that signpost is something that I can’t remember feeling before while running. It’s not even as if I’d run the furthest or the fastest that I’d ever run.

I had incredibly sharp pains running all the way up my chest and throat, that stabbed at me whenever I tried to take even the shallowest of breaths. It felt like I was inhaling knives. I have never been in so much physical pain after a short jog, or perhaps after any exercise. The pain didn’t go away for the rest of the walk home. It was only about a five minute walk, I didn’t get very far, but the whole time I was struggling to breathe through the pain.

About halfway home I started feeling nauseous – again, something that hasn’t happened to me before – and feared that I might humiliate myself by throwing up on the side of a main road. Crossing my fingers, I willed away the nausea and continued my walk. Luckily I reached my house without incident, and it was only after dropping like a rock onto the couch and lying there for several minutes that the pain started to ebb, and the nausea started to disappear.

Is this what happens when you run after eating a whole pizza? Or is it because it was a cool evening and I hadn’t warmed up before I started running? Please don’t tell me it’s because I’m unfit, because boy does that make it harder to force myself out on those runs.

Lifestyle changes

I’ve started exercising again, but this time I’m going to stick to it. No, really, I am.

There have been a lot of times in the past where I’ve been swept up in a whirlwind of exercising, eating healthy, and just generally not being a lazy slob, like I usually am. As is expected, there have also been a lot of times in the past where I’ve given up on these fazes.

To my credit, I have often had a good reason to stop. A number of times I’ve given up on exercising I’ve attributed to a knee injury I received back in my last year of high school, about three years ago. Without even trying, I managed to tear the cartilage in my left knee. Every now and then it would play up, usually (inconveniently) when I started doing regular exercise.

At one point I started going for runs. Runs, for me, are really just powerwalks with bursts of running, a compromise that I think gives me a relatively good cardio workout, without killing me. The fact is, I may not be fat, but I’m very unfit. Going for a run and not stopping to walk is not something I could do. It’s not even about me being lazy, I simply can’t do it. That makes running with other people really difficult, because while they zoom off ahead and try to encourage me to just keep going, I’m five seconds away from collapsing to the ground in a little ball and melting into the pavement from sheer exhaustion. My chest feels like it’s simultaneously being torn apart and stomped all over by a herd of rogue elephants, and when I breathe in it’s as if the air never actually reaches my lungs, just gets halfway there and then disappears again.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic. Maybe everybody else feels the same way when they run and I’m just being a wuss. One thing that gave me pause, though, and made me wonder if it wasn’t entirely my unfitness, was the fact that my friend, an otherwise healthy, fit and active person, described some of the same conditions I feel when she went for a run the other day, conditions that she believed might be asthma related.

I had asthma as a child (mild), and always thought I’d just sort of grown out of it. I’m wondering now if maybe it’s hung around to pester me when I try to be healthy? I’m probably wrong, but it would be nice to think that the reason I feel like I’m dying whenever I run is not just because I’m a particularly inactive person.

But yeah, I started going to the gym last year, and had to stop because my knee injury played up something chronic. Later on, when it felt better, I started going for runs, but had to stop again because I had surgery for said knee. From then on it was quite awhile before I could exercise again. I’m back on the horse now, though, and I’m feeling good.

Anyway, I’ve been for a walk/run three times this week, as well as doing swiss ball workouts whenever I have the time. Today, my flatmate and I went for a powerwalk around Hamilton Lake and when we got home I Youtubed a lower body workout with yoga balls. Now I’m feeling good about myself. Sacha, of course, gave me cookies to eat afterwards, but at least I did something with myself today.

I’m sticking to this one, if it’s the last thing I do.