Like I said earlier, I hate running. But I found that many of my friends were interested in it, so I got more interested in it for the social aspects.

For someone like me, running isn’t fun. It hurts. When I was heavier, it hurt more. My knees and feet and ankles gave me pain; my chest hurt from breathing so hard. And there was chafing. But I (as usual) did a lot of research and discovered that there were techniques for people like me.

From my cycling training I learned there were training schedules–basically, calendars telling you when you ought to be riding a certain amount of miles to get to a goal (like doing a century ride–100 miles in a day). There had to be similar things for runners, and sure enough, I found them.

A training schedule assumes, typically, that you’re starting from ground zero, which I was. While I had started cycling again, I really had never done much running. So I really was starting from nothing. What the training schedules I followed told me to do was to start walking–that I could do. A few minutes walking to warm up, followed by a minute of running, a minute of walking, and so forth, ending with a few minutes of walking to cool down.

The running still wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t nearly as tough as running a straight ten minutes. But the beauty of a training schedule is that eventually you start running a straight ten minutes. Then twenty. Then more.

By the time I got up to half an hour, I was running close to three miles–slowly. I wasn’t fast, and I don’t think I ever will be. My goals were not speed, but distance and no injuries.

And then I found the ultimate training guide for someone like me: The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer. Which gave me an idea. Not necessarily the best one, it turns out…