Checking progress and cutting myself some slack

As the whole world knows by now, I'm involved in a serious love affair with the treadmill.

I don't understand how it happened, really. A good friend of mine, with whom I used to visit the gym occasionally way back during my Ohio State days, began running. She blogged about it and posted about it on Facebook, via RunKeeper, and I remember being so incredibly impressed. She was always fitter than I was, but she was no runner, no more than I was. Nevertheless, here she was, making this huge, visible change in her life.

It inspired me.

So a little over a year ago, I started on the treadmill. Bit by bit, I worked up from alternating one minute walk/one minute jog to running six minutes at a time. I quickly learned about these crazy endorphin things and made good friends with the runner's high.

Of course, I didn't stick with it, which is how I got here and ended up down this new path of mine. But I remembered how amazing it felt to be running for real, and I was excited to get back to it this time around.

When I started on the treadmill less than two months ago, my mile was back to over 17 minutes and I couldn't run more than a minute or two at a time. I've been running three or four times a week, slowly chipping away at my personal bests, finding myself desperate for that endorphin rush at the end of my day. I shared elatedly last Friday that I coasted right by my last record, ending my mile at 13:52. On Saturday, did even better and landed at 13:44.

Tonight, I finished my mile in 14:01 and felt a pang of disappointment. My legs are still aching from Monday night, I'm barely able to climb stairs, and I had some kind of shin splint going on in my left leg that made even my walking intervals difficult. By any logical measure, I had a great night. Still, disappointment.

Posting gains two days in a row is an incredible affirmation that I'm on the right track, but as I discovered tonight, it's unrealistic to expect it to continue regularly. Such expectation is foolish and ignorant of how the body works, and shame on me for throwing my knowledge out the window.

Tonight was still my third-fastest mile of my adult life, and if not for the leg pain, I could have gone on to post a great two-mile time. I ran solidly for a half mile, which I've never done before. I put in a two-minute interval at 5.0mph, which is faster than I usually run. Tonight had the ingredients of something awesome. It just didn't happen tonight. And that's okay.

So I move on, trying to forgive myself for my disappointment. I'm sure I'll be disappointed again sometime, probably soon, probably for equally foolish reasons.

Did a weigh-in tonight, out of curiosity. I'm at 225, down 13lbs from my start eight weeks ago. It's working. Slowly but surely, it's working.

Thank goodness for that.