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I have always been quite envious of those people you always see running along the side of the road. The ones that you see when you’re driving to the supermarket, and then you pass them again on the way home, an hour later, still running. I have never, ever, ever been a runner. I never even tried to complete a mile and a half in the recommended 13 minutes (prior to two months ago). In fact, in New York you are required to pass gym class every year, through 4 years of high school. I was so fat and inactive that when it was coming close to senior year I was told that I would not be able to graduate with my class because I would have to come back and take 4 gym classes a day, for the whole year. That’s right, my fat ass fail every year of Gym class. Needless to say I dropped out and got my GED instead.

But I have always wanted to be in the kind of shape it takes to run 20 miles a day before work and still be able to make it through the day without a nap. I have lost a lot of weight and I have worked pretty hard to get into shape lately. I have become addicted to the Gym, though my workouts have consisted primarily of weight and resistance training. I have limited my cardio primarily to the stationary bike and an occasional elliptical machine. Then a little while ago I was given the opportunity to take the SWAT training course. The only stipulation was that you had to pass the basic Cooper’s Test. The 26 push-ups and 32 sit-ups in a minute (each) was no big deal to me. The mile-and-a-half in 13:22 minutes, now that was a whole other story. How in the hell is a guy who’s only experience in long distance running was chasing that damn ice cream truck down my block before that deaf old bastard finally heard me and stopped going to do a 13:22 mile point five?

I had no idea how, but I was going to try anyway. I started walking a mile the first day and being that I was in relatively OK shape it was quite easy so I quickly went to 2 miles then I started adding occasional jogs in between walking. After a while I bumped up to 3 and then 4 miles. I am now at the point where I can jog more then I need to walk and a strange thing started to happen as I was going out and doing this. My addictive personality really started getting into it. My goal became running a 5K and an opportunity suddenly came up to do the Officer’s Memorial 5K on Memorial Day Weekend. I started training even harder for that, running every other day. I would alternate 4 mile street runs one day, then 2 miles at the University Track (it’s made of rubber so it’s great to run on), and 1.5 miles on the treadmill. I would also throw in sprints to work on my speed where I would run the straights of the track as fast as I could run, then walk the curved part, as many times as I could before getting woozy.

This Saturday was the Officer’s Memorial 5K. I only had 2 goals, A) finish and B) Don’t finish last. Several people from my Department also went and I partnered up with one of my friends and we ran together. She recently had back surgery and she was experiencing bad foot pain so we went slow. She kept saying “I’m holding you up, go on without me.” But you never leave your wingman. We walked more then I would have wanted but I didn’t mind because it was the experience of my first 5K that I was looking for. I ended up finishing 196 out of 269 runners. I know that if she wasn’t having problems with her feet we could have been up much higher because I was not even out of breath or hurting at the end. I felt great, as if I could to it a second time.  But if you knew me in High School, you would never have expected this from me and you would never recognize me today.

I am going to run a couple more 5K’s this year I am sure, but the next goal is the 10K. The SWAT school was delayed for me this year, but even if I never go, it was a great catalyst to a great new hobby. Some day, someone may drive down the road and see me running and become motivated to start moving… how great would that be?

In case you can’t tell, I’m the one on the right…