Volume 1, Number 1

Here's where it starts.

What is it? I don't know yet. This I know: One of my inspirations for starting this blog, reflected in the name, was running, a sport (activity?) I've enjoyed off and on since college days, that is, for 25 years.

About four years ago, mostly because of some pain in my knees that I took as a warning, but also maybe because I was feeling bored, I stopped running. Took up yoga. Just left my gym bag behind my office door and never lifted it again.

A year ago, however, I began to think about running, to remember it fondly, to miss it. Beautiful memories of my greatest runs--along the ocean, on lonely country roads, in far-off sun-kissed places, California, Umbria--welled up in daydreams. I found myself reading about running again, pulling out my old faded copies of George Sheehan's books, leafing through Runners World at the library, bookmarking running sites on the Web.

At first I was afraid to start back. A big-boned 6-foot-3, I'd never really had the body for it, and three years of relative inactivity had brought my weight to 215. My knees just won't hold up, I thought.

I started anyway, urged at last by the encouragement on Jeff Galloway's website, the example of Thaddeus Kostrubala, the middle-aged doctor who wrote The Joy of Running, the tiny woman on my hall at work who ran Boston. I started slowly, on Memorial Day, alternating a minute of running with a minute of walking for a period of thirty minutes.

I kept at it, every other day, then four times a week, building the run/walk ratio to 2:1, 3:1, 6:1, 9:1, then adding minutes, until I was running over 20 miles per week (though not tracking miles at all). I began to feel strong. I lost weight. By the end of the summer I had even started racing again.

The important thing is this: At 47 I realized how much I loved running, how much it had meant to me over the years, how much it could still mean. I began to appreciate the sport in a way I never really had. Where before I had often fought myself, forced myself to run, now I looked forward to it, built my days and weeks around it, cherished every opportunity to get out on the road.

In a life that had become more complicated, more weighted with responsibility and age and sadness, running became a singular, unadulterated joy. Part of what I want to do here is simply to explore that.