If you ask a kid if they love running, says Tony Markey of Mukilteo, they look at you like you’re a Martian. Do they love running? Of course, in the same way they love breathing. It’s just something you do.
Somewhere between being a kid and growing up, though, Markey learned to hate running.
Not just dislike, to really hate it.
Yet he was surrounded by people, his wife included, who adored running. For them, running was their happy place.
So Markey, 47, decide he wanted to see if he could find that feeling. So he set up an experiment. He’d run for 30 days, every day, for 30 minutes each.
He wanted to see if he could find a bit of running he enjoyed.
Every day, he ran. He brought along a recorder and dictated thoughts as they occurred to him. Each day he’d write up how his run went.
He turned his month of running into an eBook, “Re-Run: My 30-Day Experiment to Fall Back in Love with Running,” which can be found on Amazon.
Markey said there’s a dearth of literature about mediocre runners. He wanted to fill that gap.
Some days were a struggle, but he finished. In fact, on day 31, he ran the Seattle half marathon. It wasn’t pretty, he said, but he finished.
And he has a new appreciation for running. While it might never be his happy place, he feels he’s learned a lot from the experiment.
The biggest challenge for him was not improving every day. Somedays are just harder and slower, and that was a challenge for him.
“I’m trying, now, to be present in the moment, rather than always trying to be bigger, faster, stronger,” he said.
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