The faster they are, the harder they fall.
I’m dying to tell someone about this, but nobody cares so I guess I"ll blog about it instead!
A couple of days ago I was out running (that’s the cool part. I was running. I haven’t been doing that for very long.), and I tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and went flying. I scraped up my hands, my knees, and one shoulder (!).
Why would I be excited to talk about that, you may wonder. Well, I will tell you. I was going fast! That’s the cool part, that I was going fast enough to actually hurt myself when I fell. A few weeks ago, I was barely shuffling along on my 10 second runs (literally. I was alternating running for 10 seconds and walking for one minute when I started) . A trip would most likely not even cause a fall, because my momentum was so small that recovering my balance before hitting the ground was highly likely. Plus, I was only running for 10 seconds at a time, so the odds of hitting that crack in the sidewalk while actually running were much smaller.
But this week, I was running for actual minutes at a time, and fast enough to actually go sailing when I tripped. That’s progress. My definition of “fast” is pretty conservative, of course. I’ll never be really “fast” when comparing myself to others. But, I choose to compare myself to my previous self, and this new self is fast in that context.
The other cool thing about falling is that I picked myself up, walked it off for a bit, and then RAN SOME MORE. Before I fell, I was not having the best run. I was feeling tired and discouraged. I was constantly having to fight off the barrage of negative thoughts that kept relentlessly marching through my head. But, falling taught me something about myself. It taught me that I really want to do this. I really want to run. I have always wanted to run, been envious of the people I saw who ran or jogged by. But, it is genuinely difficult to start running if you’ve never done it before. It takes time, dedication, and consistent practice to go from walking to running. I never felt that I had what it would take to do that. It’s not enough to just want to run. You have to want to do the work that it will take to work up to running. That desire is something I never had before now.
Of course, falling is not something I prefer to do regularly, so I will most likely avoid that stretch of sidewalk on future runs. I know my future runs are going to be even longer and possibly even faster and part of the reason I know it is because of that fall. I think I’ll paste pictures of my scrapes into my running journal, just as a reminder.
