Episode 285: How I finally got running to stick after 30 years

Okay, today, today I'm circling back around to an episode that you guys had requested a couple of weeks ago, and that is around my newfound, rekindled, or restarted, um, relationship with running.

So I have been talking about this on Instagram for a while because I started running, honestly, guys, I don't even remember.

I think it was late last summer into the fall.

Um, it was definitely over the winter because I ran a lot in the cold weather, which I shockingly enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would.

I actually like it better than running in the heat.

[sniffs] Excuse me.

Um, and I wanted to talk about this because for the f- really, for the first time in my life, and I just turned 46 a couple weeks ago, I am running not to try and lose weight or change my body.

I am running partially because I am enjoying it, although I don't enjoy every run that I do, and I'm also not at the beginning of a run thinking to myself, "Oh, yay, I'm so excited to go do this," which leads me into one of the other reasons why I'm doing it, which is a very, very important form of self-care.

And not to use an overused term, but to be more specific about this, there's a mental component to this and there's a physical component to this.

Um, the mental component is challenging myself to do something, A, that I don't always want to do, but that feels physically challenging, right? And getting the mental proof, the evidence, that I can do physically challenging things with my body.

That is a highly underrated, overlooked, um, thing, for lack of a better term, that exercise can help us with.

Now this is not to say that every time you do a workout, you need to do this ridiculously hard thing just to prove to yourself you can do hard things, no.

But weaving in more challenging workouts for the mental component, there's a ton of benefit to that because then it carries over to other parts of your life in terms of knowing that you have the capacity to do hard things.

I'm not saying that running three miles is the same as, like, dealing with, like, grief or trauma.

I'm not saying that.

And also, I'm not saying it's not at all usable.

So, um, our brain doesn't exist in silos of things, and there's also the piece of this where walking and running in some form can also just help in terms of, like, all the n- and this is biochemistry that I am not familiar with at all, but there's lots of research that shows us that, um, cardiovascular exercise plays a role in mental health, right? So if you are someone who suffers from depression, um, or even not even, say, like, clinically diagnosed depression, but just, like, feeling blue, feeling sad, feeling down, um, that cardiovascular exercise can absolutely help.

Doesn't have to be in the form of running.

Then there's the physical piece, um, that for me, in terms of taking care of my body, taking care of my heart, um, knowing what's coming for me with perimenopause, and just wanting to get my body into as good of a place physically as I can, um- Kind of like quote unquote, like from the inside out, meaning that I know that these runs that I'm doing are benefiting me, 'cause I'm doing a mix of like very slow...

Like when I run, I'm running like the fastest I'll ever run would be like a 10:20 pace, which is fast.

Usually I'm much closer to 11, and often I'm even above 11 minutes per mile, so this is like a jog.

And then once a week or once every other week, I will do a 15-minute HIIT workout on the treadmill where I am sprinting.

Those are like all-out sprints on the treadmill.

But it's only about like 10 minutes of actual work.

It's probably about six to seven minutes of actual work because it's interval training, so it's alternating running and walking.