Allow me to take you back to my childhood. I was an active child and I always played outside. Biking, swimming, and hiking were my favorite activities. Stories of my childhood include me trying to coax my couch potato friends away from the TV so that we could go outside and play. Sadly, that didn’t last long. Once I moved to Arizona from California, summer was filled with sitting inside my air conditioned home, trying to avoid the 100°+ heat. Thus began my sedentary lifestyle.

Next came middle school, where my sadistic physical education teachers gave me a newfound hatred of running. I’m not kidding; they were sadists and I truly despised running. Every month students were required to run a mile. If I wasn’t huffing and puffing while attempting to run a quarter mile, I was being yelled at to “stop walking” through a megaphone by a PE teacher who, instead of running the mile with the other teachers, sat on her ass on the bleachers. Two years of that torture yielded a girl who not only hated running, but could barely run at all. My best mile time was 10:35 completed by mostly walking and barely jogging and I didn’t even actually finish the full mile.

High school was no better; I hate running all the same and only participated in the one year mandated PE class. After that year, I walked away from any type of sports activity in high school and never looked back.

Through my childhood, middle school, and high school it didn’t really matter if I exercised or not. I was super skinny with a fast metabolism and ate anything I wanted. Before you start hating me, know that the gravy train didn’t last long. By my early twenties my metabolism wasn’t the same and weight gain became my battle.

Thus began my desire to get active, improve my health and loose weight. My first attempt to reach these goals came last year with the help of my boyfriend, an ex track and cross-country runner. He helped whip me into shape, but I gave up after a few months. We moved away from the track that we’d run on and the exercise ceased.

Fast forward one year, I am at my highest weight (which I will not disclose) and fed up with how out of shape I am. I spent most of my final semester in college being sedentary and working at an internship that had me sitting at a desk all day. So I’ve decided to take up running, for real this time. I want to get into shape for once and for all, and be healthy for the rest of my life.

Yesterday I went running for the second time at the beach close to my house. For the first time in my life I ran an entire mile without stopping. I was shocked and so happy. I pushed myself to go farther than I normally would and I felt great. I could hardly believe it and kept asking myself “did I just do that?”. I went from being a girl who literally walked 90% of each mile I was supposed to run in school, to being a girl who pushed herself to go out and run on her own and actually complete a goal.

Of course I had some soreness afterwards but not enough to deter me from continuing. My plan is to work up to running almost everyday; right now I am doing it every other day. My hope is to really love running and maybe, just maybe, finish a race.