Id vs. Ego on a Saturday Morning (or, "Yay, Endorphins!")

The activity of running has never been an especially entertaining one in my opinion. I've always preferred the quick adrenaline kicks from biking downhill over hazardous roots or the low key, quiet plodding up steep mountains over the monotonous thumping of sneakers along a paved track. The admiration for those that did do the miles each day was there, but, honestly, running as an activity has, for me, always been an absolute bore. As such, I've never built up the endurance that months ago I decided to attain. The reasons behind this are legion but honestly has more to do with retaining a few grains of sand in the hourglass than anything else.

This being said, I've been running for a few weeks now, a necessary cardio-evil tagged onto a much more enjoyable weightlifting regimen. I've approached it just as something I've had to endure, like cleaning the plate of spinach in order to get to the dessert. So far I'd not let anything get in the way of it, either... until, this morning, I woke with a headache.

Like some sort of knowing and cynical spectator, my 'other' self thought, "Uh-oh. I bet this is gonna be used as a great reason not to go today."

And it won out for a while, too, about an hour and a half. I gnawed at me, though, that this one break from routine, not long after I'd ramped up the mileage, would begin a habit of letting things slide. This was the first real speedbump after weeks of responsible success, and a small one at that.

Shoring my courage, I eventually gathered my bag and took off to the gym. Still squinting from the pain induced from the brightness of the sun, part of me was rebelling the entire walk to the front door of the fitness center ("You can turn back... you'll feel worse afterwards... you really dislike this, y'know, and you have a good excuse"), but once inside seemed to lose its voice.

Within a few minutes on the treadmill (running still bores me, but VH1 helps, hence the reason I was inside running on such an otherwise gorgeous day) I realized my headache was gone. What's more, by the end of my scheduled mileage I felt as though I could have kept going, a first... in my life, really... and probably would have had it not been for the time. I felt absolutely wonderful when I left the gym, energized, not worn out. Activated, not drained. With no headache in sight.

I've heard of reaching a point where one actually... enjoys... running, but I've never gotten close until today. It's perplexing, really, and I do look forward to going back Monday to find whether or not today was just a fluke. If it's not, my life may well have just changed today.

But, then again, that other self is right there, saying, "We'll see."