Running

I hate to run.  I've always hated to run.  I've never enjoyed running and would rather eat nails than run.
 
But, over the past three or four months I've begun running at least a mile in the morning with my trusty companion Melissa Marie at my side.
 
Melissa Marie is a ten year old Alaskan Malamute who, before we started running, was about twenty pounds overweight.  In fact, the Vet prescribed some RD prescription food for her.  (She absolutely refused to eat it, so I took the big bag of dry and the twenty-four cans of meat to the Maxfund, a no-kill shelter in near West Denver.)   At the worst, Melissa weighed about ninety-six pounds.  She's now down to about eighty pounds.
 
I'm down to 165 after eight months of following Atkins and exercising.  (I started out at 205.)
 
Anyway, I hate to run.  But I do.  Every morning with Melissa at my side.
 
It's curious.  I've never really studied the physiology of running, but let me tell you there is a significant physiology to running which begins with pain.  Yes, after the first minute or so of actually giving physical movement to that commitment to run, the body churns up this, Hey are you kidding me! message to the brain, suggesting that this body, my body, is not capable of this much torture; every muscle, every bone, my lungs, my heart scream:  Stop!  Please Stop this insanity!   But, I move on.  I keep going.  I keep chugging ahead ... with Melissa at my side who, by the way, doesn't really have to run to keep up with me.  She just kind of walks fast. 
 
Soon, after about four or five minutes, my body says, Okay, I can do this, and the pain, the torture in  every muscle and organ of my  body abates, lessens.  As a matter of fact, after about four or five minutes, I feel as though I could go on forever.  I feel good.  I feel like what I am doing is about the most incredibly remarkable thing I've done in a long, long time.  (This is probably what's called the runner's high  which probably has something to do with endorphin production by the body.)
 
It doesn't hurt either that Melissa and I run around the Berkeley Park lake where we've seen storks (egrets??) and other exotic wildlife cohabiting with the gnats and mosquitoes, geese and squirrels, trout and suckers, all of whom call Berkeley home.
 
Pretty boring post.  But, what the hell.  If you're ever at Berkeley Park at, oh, six-thirty in the morning and see a newly svelt older gentleman in shorts, t-shirt and baseball cap with a beautiful, haughty Alaskan Malamute leading him around the lake nod a hello and understand ... I really hate to run.