I woke up this morning with sore arches and calves. It made me smile. It was the kind of pain that says that I was working new muscles that have grown sleepy. Progress! I wore my VFFs all day again, despite the twinges in my muscles.
During my first year in Boston, I had five finals in forty eight hours. It was very stressful and overwhelming, particularly because the classes were all very difficult, and there was the added complication of the fact that I had stopped going to my calculus class about a month into the semester. I had a lot to teach myself. I got so stressed out at one point that I spontaneously got inspired to go upstairs to the small fitness room in my building, and run. There was no treadmill, because the tenants below the fitness room complained too much about the noise of people pounding on the treadmill as they ran, but there was an elliptical, which was my exercise machine of choice anyway. I got up there and I ran for about twenty minutes. And when I was finished, my quads were tight, I was out of breath, but I was quite relaxed.
Tonight, I was working on a final project for a class, and it was not going well. The assignment was due in seven hours and I still had nothing to show for myself. For the second time in my life, I got inspired to run to relieve stress. I'm not sure if this would have been my response if I hadn't just started this journey. Somehow, I suspect that it just may have been. I actually had been feeling this need to run a lot lately, but never actually did it because the need to "just run" quickly got outweighed by the thoughts telling myself that I'm too out of shape and too weak to run anywhere.
I looked up my house on Google Maps and saw that around my block was approximately 0.4 miles. I figured that I could run that distance. After all, in high school, I had no problem running a half mile with no preparation for gym class. I put on a pair of shorts, tied up my hair, and headed out the door. Despite the warnings of the internet telling me to walk long before I run, I took off.
The first thing I noticed was that my foot immediately knew how to land. I was wearing VFFs, and was not actually barefoot, but without even thinking about my stride, my foot knew to land on the forefoot instead of the heel. I found this to be kind of magical. I had read about people saying this online, but I didn't think it was really true... I really expected to have to concentrate on where to put each foot. I made it halfway around the block before my pathetic cardiovascular endurance pulled me to a stop. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't even run the whole way, but I walked for a little while before running the last bit back to the house. I would estimate that I ran about a third of a mile in total. Not too bad for someone who had never really run before, and never ran at all without supportive shoes. I felt pretty proud of myself.
Until I got in the house and felt like I was going to die.
My stomach started cramping with some of the worst cramps I've ever felt. I collapsed on my bed in the dark, just trying to make the pain stop. I tried to remove anything constricting from my body. Trying to pull off Vibram shoes while lying face down in pain on a bed is no easy task. Nothing was helping. I briefly considered taking an ibuprofen, but just the thought of it seemed to make the pain worse. I ended up pulling myself into a sitting position and sat with my head between my knees for several minutes. Eventually the pain subsided and then disappeared as quickly as it started. I'm not really sure what started it, but I'll forgive my body for complaining after I run for the first time, when I probably shouldn't have been running in the first place.
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