Introduction
Jess Runs Away: A Couch Potato on the Run
It's pretty lame, but it's true. I'm a giant couch potato. I don't really know what's happened to me lately. The past six months I've gained almost 20 pounds and I'm exhausted all the time. I have no energy for anything.
A couple of years ago I was in good shape, running four or five times a week, hiking, walking, biking. Now I'm a couch potato (baked, mashed, however you like it), stuck on the couch and watching too many episodes of The Hills on MTV. (And let me tell you, The Hills has been proven to kill a whole petri dish of brain cells in the blink of an eye, so this is an addiction that MUST STOP.)
Now that I've got that off my chest, I've made an effort the past couple of weeks to haul my ass off the couch and actually go for a run a few times. Let me stop to take a moment and offer my definition of this term:
Go for a run: [goh fawr ə ruhn], verb
1. to get up, go to the local track, and then move at the pace of a lazy jog for longer than 30 seconds
2. to think about getting up, going to the local track, and moving at the pace of a lazy jog for longer than 30 seconds
Based on the second definition, I've gone for a run quite a few times the past two weeks!
Here's the serious goal, though: I want to run in the Dallas Big D Texas half-marathon in April in support of cancer fundraising. My grandmother passed away from leukemia in 2001, and my boyfriend is currently battling Stage III stomach cancer at the age of 22. I recently read an article in Time that at current rates, half of the men and one-third of the women alive on this planet today will be diagnosed with some type of cancer at some point in their lives. Those are scary numbers, especially considering we are battling this disease blindly. Sure, chemotherapy and radiation may work...for some people. But in many cases, the diagnosis comes too late. And in many other cases, chemotherapy and radiation are ineffective against more aggressive cancers.
Cancer is terrifying -- everyone knows that. But somehow in today's politics, cancer research funding takes a backseat to saving our economy, the war in Iraq, campaign financing, and so on. So to me, busting my ass on an endurance run (and having you all laugh hilariously at me) is no big deal if it means I can get even a few dollars donated to cancer research.
Anyway, April may seem like a long way off right now, but it'll probably creep up faster than I would like. I'm writing this blog to document my transition (I hope!) from an overweight couch potato to a distance runner. More importantly, this blog will keep me motivated because if even a few people keep reading it, they'll hold me accountable for being a worthless slacker on those days when The Hills is more alluring than hitting the track.
Stay tuned!