TITLE: A New Start
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 12, 2007  7:27 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I had a new experience running this morning.  I ran!  That
seemed novel, given my inability to run the last few weeks.
Due to a persistent something that kept me at 50-90% strength
since January 5, I hadn't run in 2 weeks and a weekend; I
had managed to run once in the week before that, and twice
in each of the two weeks before that, for a total of five
runs in five weeks.  An expected result of this off-time was
a loss of fitness.  An unexpected result was a certain loss
of memory.  Dressing and preparing for the run felt odd.
I'm a creature of habit, and two weeks is a good start on
new habits.

Nothing could have made my first run in so long more enjoyable
than one of the great pleasures of an early-morning runner.
Last evening, we received a little under an inch of wet snow,
so this morning my first steps broke fresh snow.  The crunch
under my feet made the run seem new in more than one way.

True to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-01.html#e2007-01-26T17_13_06.htm">
   my supposition</A>
from a couple of weeks ago, I plan to take my restart slow
and steady.  So today I ran a slow and easy three miles. My
three-mile routes have not been put to much use in the last
year or so, so the route itself seemed new, too.  I didn't
worry about speed.  Instead I merely focused on the feeling
in my lungs as they worked for the first time in a couple
of weeks, on the feeling in my legs as they pushed me forward,
in my hips as they adjusted to the slightly uncertain steps
on wet snow.  It was good.
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