going to buy new running shoes today let's hope no one is mean to me at the store 👍

For anyone following my journey after joining the One Bean/No Spleen club, I ran a half-marathon this weekend. THIRTEEN MOTHERFUCKING MILES. No one was even chasing me.

This was my first half-marathon because even though I'm a big ol' gym rat, running is uh. Not my bag. Whenever I talk to people who are like, "I tried to get into fitness but I hated cardio", I always say "you don't hate cardio, you just hate running". Normally I go out a couple of times a week in the spring and fall when the weather is temperate and the sidewalks aren't icy, and then I take like, a four month break so I can forget how boring it is before I try it again.

I cannot emphasize enough how much you can be really into fitness and not enjoy running. If you take nothing else away from this, take that, and be free of the obligation to get into running as a way of starting a fitness journey. I've been in the gym more or less six days a week for over fifteen years and I have my personal trainer cert so I'm a credible source I promise.

After joining the one bean/no spleen club in December, I realized that I wouldn't be doing kickboxing or dance or HIIT or anything else involving twisting or suddenly engaging my abs for a bit, but I really wanted to start doing cardio again that wasn't just endless walking. Being rabidly and obnoxiously goal-oriented, I decided to train for a half-marathon so that I'd be motivated to run, and also because it was an easy way to track progress on my return-to-fitness journey.

Spleengate was a super scary experience during which my body did something totally out of my control and put me in danger, so I wanted to reclaim some sense of that control and normalcy. I really wanted to remind myself that my body can do awesome and impressive things and that I can decide that. So yes, I figured; I'll run 13 miles and then who knows? Maybe I'll keep on running. (Lmao. Big maybe.)

During my training, around the eight or nine mile mark, I started to realize that there's something about long runs that I maybe... almost... like? My hatred of running has definitely started to move toward ambivalence. I had done some reading about how running consistently longer distances at a relaxed pace actually prompts your body to generate more mitochondria (THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL) so you become more effective at generating energy, and I was like, uh huh. Sure Jan. Well, it turns out that either that's noticeably true or else I just blew past a psychological barrier and realized that running a long way is just putting one foot in front of the other for a while. Probably both? Anyway. It's fun to witness your brain re-calibrate in real time. I'm starting to train for a full marathon which is just not something I ever thought would be me so maybe spleengate has a silver lining after all.

P.S. In the picture below of me rocking my 16-year-old-boy-during-hockey-playoffs-hair-hat-combo I'm wearing a set of jump wings from Band of Brothers that @fayestardust got for me. Three miles up, three miles down all the way, baby!

P.P.S. My time was 2:09, if you're interested!