My love/hate relationship with running

I don’t know about you, but my feelings towards running seem to change more often than I would like them to. I go through phases of really not enjoying it, followed by being almost obsessed by it.

I’ve been running for as long as I can remember, as both of my parents run, and they encouraged me to join them from an early age. As a family we are very much health and fitness orientated, so for us it has always been quite an important part of our lives.

I started by doing short jogs around the area I live in, just a ten minute run or something like that. While I was at secondary school I would wake up at 6am (I know, so early) and go for a twenty minute run through the park near my house. This slowly increased as I became more confident and from then I would try to increase either the distance I was covering or the speed at which I was doing it. This was definitely one of my obsession periods.

Before I went away to University I joined a gym near my house with my parents and from then on focussed more on that rather than running. I used the treadmill in the gym, of course, but I preferred to use other machines such as the bike or exercises with weights, for example. Then I moved away and joined a gym at my University, and did pretty much the same as I had done at home. After two years of being a member there I decided I was ready to take up running again, as it was cheaper. Besides, I was about to go on my year abroad and I wasn’t sure what the gym facilities would be like in the small town I was going to be living in.

Throughout my year abroad I ran in the mornings again, before work. I enjoyed doing that, as it meant that I got my daily exercise done early and had the rest of the day to do what I wanted to do. Another advantage of running at that time was that there weren’t many people around to see me looking like a tomato!

Now back in the UK again, my passion for running is at an all-time high. Last year I competed in my first Race for Life, a run to raise money to help fight cancer. It isn’t necessarily a competitive run; however I managed to come within the top ten runners, out of thousands of women and girls. Since then, my love for the sport has increased and this has meant that I have been able to run further and faster than ever before. Hopefully from now on our relationship will be purely positive, rather than falling in and out of love.