Running = Happiness

Okay, so we all know that true and everlasting happiness is from being righteous and having true conversion to the Gospel, but that's not what I wanted to touch on today (though it is extremely important).

Today I want to talk about my new favorite thing. Running. I'll admit, in 7th grade I was that girl that took her precious time running the mile and probably only broke 11 minutes on accident. It was the same in 8th grade, but I think I started to feel like I wanted to improve. 9th grade is what really brought on change. I was still young so I didn't have a very...uh...lasting motivation to run my best. To be honest I ran my hardest to impress a boy in my gym class. I can say though that I was always the first girl to finish running the mile (luckily I didn't have any girl athletes in my class so it wasn't too hard to do). Well it turns out that this didn't impress him (figures) but I learned that I loved the thrill of knowing that I improved, even if it was just by a couple seconds.

Last year I decided that I wanted to get more serious about running. I wanted to be fit and energized. I had this mental plan of when I would run and work out at our on campus gym, but I didn't really get anywhere with it. This year I thought long and hard about that. I mean the desire to be fit was a good one, so why wasn't it motivating me enough to go exercise even for just 30 minutes? It's because the goal wasn't measurable. I don't believe that you sure measure fitness by weight and inches and measuring how I felt after working out didn't work either. So this year I decided I wanted to run a half marathon. A 5k is a little over 3 miles so that wouldn't require that I have a lot of training, to run a 10k would maybe use a little bit of preparation, but I wanted more. I found a race in May and a 12 week plan online to help me build up to 13.1 miles. This is a goal that has definitely kicked in the motivation I have been looking for. I have only started off at 3 mile runs but that's okay. You have to start somewhere. The exciting thing is how much I have improved. Yesterday I beat my PR by 4 minutes from my time last week! 4 solid minutes! I was ecstatic! Today I beat yesterdays PR by about 54 seconds, almost another minute. Though my overall time isn't impressive, I still get excited. It was really hard to contain myself today after  running my 3 miles. I couldn't stop from smiling and I had to control myself from jumping up and down. I was, no doubt, excited :) Now I realize that there is going to be a point where I will only be improving by seconds if at all, but for now I am letting my excitment build my motivation to continue running and pushing myself. Gah!!!

Oh, and as a side note, yesterday didn't turn out bad at all. I am definitely receiving extra help to keep me from loneliness and I thank Him tremendously. But my favorite part of the day definitely was beating my PR, cheesy as that is, especially on Valentine's day.