So there I was on day one all woken up at five in the
morning ready to get on the track and do some laps. It was Monday and the month
was July I remember very well. I was all psyched I tell you, my legs were
itching to run.
I got to the college stadium and started stretching my
entire body to extents that I had never attempted before and boy did it feel
wrong on so many levels. You see, when you decide to engage your body in a
strenuous activity when it is in a state of rest; the body’s natural
predisposition is to maintain the status quo.
I tried as hard as I could to at least get my muscles ready
for the hard work ahead and when I felt my body was ready, I hit the road
running-literally. I did not dare strain myself and therefore for the first 400M
I had a fairly easy time. A short while later at about the 700 metre mark all
hell broke loose; my back started aching, my calf muscles accumulated lactic
acid hence making it very hard for me to move
I had heard of this kind of occurrence before, where
athletes hit what is referred to as the wall. Simply put, the wall is a state
during strenuous activity in which the body simply cannot continue working at
its current rate. For real athletes who run marathons however, this ‘wall’
usually manifests after the 30 KM mark; the next time you are watching a
marathon just pay close attention and you will see that it is after this mark
that a good number drop out. It takes a great deal of will power to complete
the race after hitting the wall: so I guess that we Kenyans are very
strong-willed since we win pretty much all the marathons the world over.
So there I was, having hit the wall at the 600M mark! If
that is not the epitome of unfitness then I don’t know what is. At that point I
knew that if I succumbed to exhaustion I would have a hard time going past
that mark the next time I ran and so I pushed on. I went beyond the 1KM mark
and kept on pushing until I cleared three good laps which is basically 1.2KM.
I have to tell you it was not a pleasant feeling; I was
coughing hard and sweating profusely despite the cold morning temperatures. My
legs and lower back were in pain; to say the least, I was spent. 3 laps (1.2KM)
that is all I could do on my first day. I did some stretching and went back to
my room, took a shower and went for breakfast; it was really hard getting
anything into my stomach because of what my unfit body had just undergone.
I still remember exactly what the next day felt like; my
legs and back were all sore and I wondered if it was going to be possible to
run the next day. When I went to bed that day I knew that come Wednesday
morning, I was going to have one heck of hard time psyching myself to even get
out of bed.
When the alarm rang I got up said a short prayer changed
into my running gear and off I was. My
body was still aching all over from the ‘beating’ it had taken two days earlier
but I knew I had to rise above pain. After stretching, I got right to it. I
pushed myself and this time round I am happy to say that I did a clean four
laps (1 Mile); nothing to write home about but an improvement nonetheless.
I continued on with this regimen religiously; by the end of
the first month, I was doing 8 laps (3.2KM); a far cry from where I started. At
this point I decided to stop concentrating on increasing the distance and
rather focus my energy on going faster. The very first time I managed to
complete 8 laps I took around 20 minutes ; one and a half months later I had lowered
that time to 16:42, not exactly a world beating time but something that I could
be damn proud of considering where I was barely three months ago.
By the end of October which was 3 months after I had started
running I had lost about five kilos; however as I have mentioned before, that
was not exactly my goal; all I wanted was to achieve fitness. I always had this
desire of being a battle tank with a Ferrari engine and so I never really cared
much about what I ate provided I could move swiftly.
After about six months of three-days a week running, I loved
where I was; my breathing was awesome and my heart rate was just where it
needed to be. There was a slight problem however; my shins were taking a
beating every time I ran and as time went by it was increasingly becoming
difficult to run.....problems again!
After every run I would experience a lot of pain and I
slowly started associating my healthy habit with pain; this is the worst thing
that can ever happen. In order for you to succeed in whatever you engage in-
leave alone exercising, you need to enjoy it. Here I was slowly growing to
despise something that I had grown to love?!
I had to come up with a solution fast to avoid giving up my
new passion. I decided to reduce the frequency with which I ran from thrice to
twice weekly. Running in the morning was also starting to bore me (I have never
been a morning person) and so I decided to do it in the evening after a long
day of studying among other things
The next step was to increase my endurance and the only way
I could do this was by increasing the distance I ran. I now had new
goals.............; I am going to tell you how I went about achieving them on
my next post in this series so STAY TUNED…………………….
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