For those of you that follow me on twitter (see right side toolbar) you may have noticed that I have been trying to run a little more.  It all started a couple of years ago and I am just now getting to a point where I am finally going to try and give it a real go as a lifestyle change.  You see, back in October of 2006, my wife was basically immobilized by searing back pain.  An emergency room visit, 8 mg of morphine and a chiropractor’s visit later, she was told that if she wanted to prevent this from happening again, short of surgery, she would need to start running.  I agreed to try it with her but we were never consistent and due to poor shoe fittings were plagued by small injuries that would put us out of commission.

Fast forward about 18 months and Alyssa is running consistently and leaving me in the dust.  I am topping out at 270 on the scale and I am consistently tired and all around pretty ‘blah’.  In order to remedy this I am going to start running, but I have to do it in the mornings.  Alyssa is an after work runner, but by the time she gets home at 6:15, I have already been home for an hour and have had time to get pretty settled in for the evening and lack all any motivation to join her.  After a trip to Luke’s Locker a week ago, I broke in a new pair of running shoes on Saturday morning with my wife.   She outran me a good bit as I was only able to sustain a run for about 8 minutes, compared to her 20 minutes.  But this is just the beginning.  This morning, my alarm went off at 6:30 and I rolled out of bed and in to my shoes and hit the pavement for another 8 minutes before fatiguing, which is about 2 minutes short of a full mile.  I am hoping that with a consistent every-other-day schedule that I will be able to easily tack on a minute each week.

With that, I am setting a goal of being able to run about 2.5 miles in 6 months, which is far below the goal of one-minute a week, but I am trying to be reasonable here and take life into consideration.  And with all of this, it is a desire to improve my quality of it.