Wine or jog
Starting a few weeks after giving birth to my 2nd child, I started running. Partially for fitness to lose the old baby weight, partly to look good for my cheating ex husband, and partly for sanity of dealing with work and kids.
I only intended originally back then to get into 5ks. I happened upon a male neighbor who ran and started to join him on nightly runs. His goal was to do 10 miles. He was a good coach. It worked out great. And I got to the point of also running 10 miles, and then 15, and then 18 and then a marathon.
I ran a lot of cool races. I wasn’t super fast but I was average, sometimes even slightly above in my age group. Note, there is typically a low proportion women in their mid-30s who do races. Many are younger or older so I had the advantage of just being one of the few in that age bracket.
Twelves years into it, the injuries came. One after another and I was told to stop running. And so after many tearful tries, I gave in and stopped. Ironically, this all happened around the time of my divorce which was ironically the time wine also became my BFF.
So after a few years hiatus and some confidence that maybe, just maybe these injuries can be tamed. One with lower pace and two, less miles.
So another new exciting step is I created a little old lady jog club. Well, you don’t really have to be little, old, or even just a lady but you have to want to jog. And by that, we mean a pace that is classified as a “jog,” which is anything longer than 10 minute miles. If you didn’t know that, hopefully I just taught you something. “Experts” say a running pace is 6 miles/hour and anything lower is just a jog. Or you can wog… which is what I learned today is the proper term for jog-walk-jog-walk etc.
I created the club because when I put myself out there on a local social media page looking for a ‘running buddy’ I got 10 responses! And running, oops, I mean jogging [*knodding to the experts] with 10 people separately was definitely going to be a challenge.
So, hence a little club was born. In our first get together, it was myself and 3 other women, all aged 50 and up. I was the youngest only a couple hairs away from that big 5-0 next year, but still, we all had so many commonalities. Three of the four of us divorced, one in a new relationship, one remarried. Three of the four of us had kids, all teens and up. Obviously, we were all in the same pace group and lived in the same area, although never crossed paths oddly.
So we went out on our 2 mile jog, talked, encouraged each other and it was damn lovely. Since it was our first get together, I certainly did not speak of my health goals to cut down/or stop drinking. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is another commonality I have with one of the members of the group. I’m hopeful that this will be a good motivator. Because one thing I do less of when I have a run planned, is drink.
They say everything happens for a reason.
