Why Running is Hard, by Laura E. Hunter

Believe it or not, it's not precisely because I'm 30 pounds overweight and have a non-functional ACL in my right knee. It's actually a mental thing that springs from that. Specifically, it goes like this:

You see, I'm simply never going to be a fast runner; I just don't have the knees for it. And I'm an extremely, one might occasionally say overly, competitive person. (The sound you're hearing right now is that of all of my friends and fellow MVPs clutching the pearls and gasping in feigned shock.) What this boils down to is that it's mentally challenging for me to stick with doing something that I'm not any good at. During today's 5K, I made the near-fatal mistake of looking over my shoulder after around the first hundred yards...and realizing that I was dead last. I nearly pulled off the course and quit right there, though I'm of course terribly glad that I didn't. It all worked out well in the end, as I trimmed almost 7 full minutes off of my last 5K time (37 minutes, 3 seconds) which actually squeaked me in under a 12-minute mile average time. (11.95-minute mile. Toldya I squeaked.) :-)

So the continuing drama of marathon prep continues unabated. More updates (and maybe even an actual techie post of some description) as events warrant.

(One final note: I've had a few folks remark that they don't like the fact that they need to register for an account on blogger.com in order to leave comments here. I'll see what I can do about getting Moveable Type or something similar running on the server that's hosting shutuplaura/laurahcomputing. No promises on timelines, of course, but I just wanted to let you know that it's officially sitting in the job queue.)