Friday Quote Day

Success does not come to the most
righteous and rigorously disciplined
but to those who continue running.
~Amby Burfoot

I know some of you real runners will scoff when I report yesterday’s workout. But for someone who hasn’t run since November, I feel pretty good about it.

I got the newest issue of Runner’s World last week and it’s possibly the strangest editorial mix I’ve ever seen them publish. Much of the book is devoted to Boston Marathon coverage which, to any runner, is the top o’ the heap. If you’re not Kenyan or Ethiopian, you have almost no chance of actually winning a marathon, but with enough training? Well, you might qualify for Boston.

The article that really got me excited, though, was by Marc Parent, and it was all about the newbie. While I don’t consider myself a novice runner – I have a drawer full of tech shirts and shorts, I have a favorite brand of athletic sock, heck, I even have a Garmin – I loved how full of promise the article was. And since I read it night before last, I woke up yesterday ready to run.

My decline in stamina from last fall to this spring was, in a word, evident. I drove to my favorite four-mile flat road, walked for a couple of minutes and then started trotting. I had the Shuffle with me and it didn’t take long for me to decide to walk for the length of one song and run (I use that word loosely, in that I was definitely moving faster than a walk, but it hardly qualified for a run) for the length of the next.

Toward the end I was walking one and running two. Improvement! Already!

In the hour I was out I covered 4.4 miles. That’s a 13:39 pace – nothing to brag about. And I ate like a truck driver the rest of the day. That’s nothing to brag about, either. (I felt truly hungry, although I probably could have distracted myself. Must. Work. On. That.)

At any rate, I feel confident and energetic and inspired and ready to rock. When you start at 13:39, you’re almost guaranteed to get better as time goes by.