This part of running is now one of my favorite

My running journey consists of “before” and “after”. Before was before the spring of 2020 (the pandemic year). I’d always run and enjoyed running — a couple of times a week, sometimes more often, sometimes less. Then in 2020, I started to run a lot. It was an amazing journey. I started running more, lost weight, ran even more, lost more weight. I started being aware of my weekly miles and gradually learned about all the different fancy types of running, like intervals. I wrote several stories about interval running and how much of an impact it had on me, so I don’t want to repeat the details here.

There is one other part of running I want to talk about. It’s not that fancy actually. It’s very trivial. Most kids, doing some sport, would have heard of it. In fact, it’s so trivial, it’s kind of mechanical. It’s what your PE teacher tells you to do and you do because you have to. It’s boring. It’s perfunctory. The very term is so self-explanatory, that you almost lose the meaning of it.

Warming up!

These days warming up is like… putting my make-up? Showering? Sorry for these weird analogies. For a second I thought of my wife and even my daughter. Seems to me that women feel they have to dress up at least a little when they go out. Say we step out for a dinner in the evening. I can be all scruffy and sweaty (pardon me) but women, at least my women, aren’t like that!

I don’t remember how and when I discovered the joy of warming up. It was a gradual process…