Alright lets talk about the first of the three P's of running. Before you go and throw yourself to the wolves and begin running you need to prep yourself for what lies ahead. When we chose to do something a little outside the norm or out of our comfort level a little bit of self argument typically happens. For new runners you will deal with excuse after excuse to not run as far today or to run at all, you have to get your cabeza in the game if you want to truly do this. If you go in to this with self doubt then you will fail, may be down the road but as soon as you hit a speed bump chances are you will stop. YOU CAN DO ANYTHING! I don't care if you can barely get out of your chair because you are in such bad shape, if you have the God given ability to do something, you can do it. If you are overweight or robbed of your leg from birth or a wreck you still have the ability to run. Get your
head right, now is the time to get over it. Now is the time to say, "I can" and if I can't, what can I do about it. Me personally, I have two legs, lungs that function and I have the desire to run a marathon and that is exactly what I am going to do, just watch me!!! Get moving, you are a step closer today than you were yesterday.
Good you're still here :). Very important for our new runners. Play it safe and check with your doctor to make sure you are healthy enough to run. If he gives you the green light...awesome. If you were not given the go ahead then we have a little detour not a road block.
So now we have the determination and the green light to move forward. Now is the time to be honest with yourself and set some short and long term goals as well as a running routine. Short term goals can be anything (one mile, three miles, 5K race) make sure it is something you can attain within a month or two. Long term... the sky's the limit. Setting your running routine is very important, I will tell you what I do but you should continue to reasearch other runners routines and do what works for you. Mine goes as follows: Stretch, five minute warm-up walk, run (whatever distance you choose), five minute cool down walk and finished by stretching one last time. I have remained free of injury and believe it is a common sense approach that I believe is safe and can work for others. If you need a little more guidance or how to, you could always try the Couch to 5K app. Pretty sure this is a free app and is available on most smart phones.
The last thing I would recommend is to document everything. Get one of the free running apps for your phone, don't pay unless it has a feature you like but it isn't necessary. On your first day of training take a photo of yourself, without the shirt, let it all hangout and don't bother looking at it it's not supposed to be pretty, take your measurements and weight. Now take the photo, measurements and the scale and put them all away, they wont help you lose weight unless you plan on doing curls with your scale. The scale you can bust out every two weeks because your going to no matter what but scales lie! At some point you are going to look at your scale and say, "why the fuck do I even try?", and that is one of the reasons I say put it away. This may be a great time to look at the photo you took when you first started, take new measurements. Think back to who that person was in that picture. That's not you anymore. You are YOU 2.0! Better!
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