WHAT A RUSH!!!!

I am so happy to be able to share a success story because I haven't had one for a while. My journey over the past month has been a little frustrating and what happened tonight was well needed to push me back in the right direction.

I JOGGED!

I actually jogged an entire 1/2 mile!

This is something I can honestly say I've never achieved in my whole entire life. 1/2 mile would have been two times around the track at school and there's absolutely no way I had ever jogged around that thing twice without stopping.

But that is what I did tonight and I am ever so proud of myself. I went out for a 2 mile walk, a walk which is 1 mile there and 1 mile back. I walked the first 1/2 mile at an average pace to warm up and then the next 1/2 mile a little quicker. When I turned around I finally got the courage to try something new.

I have been wanting to try to jog for a few months now. I even bought a really heavy duty sports bra several months ago in hopes that I'd be putting it to good use. And I tried back then but I wasn't really doing it right. So I didn't last long, got discouraged and quit trying. My form was wrong and I wasn't going at a slow enough pace to really get the movements down and I was jogging on my tippy toes instead of my whole foot and I guess I just feared not being able to do it so I just quit trying at that point. That was a couple months ago. Since then I had been practicing keeping my heel down on the eliptical machine (which I also "rode" with an elevated heel) and it felt really weird, but I knew I needed to get it down. It sure worked different muscles!

So I thought it was a good time to see if I could jog with my heels down. It was dusk, not many houses around, nice sidewalk to try it out on. To my amazement, I did it! I had to go pretty slow to get the motion and feel for it. I feel like I'm stomping, but I know I will get used to it the more I do it. The street lights allowed me to see my shadow on the road and even though I felt weird, I didn't look weird. It looked cool! I was actually watching myself RUN!?!?! Okay, can't really call it a run because I doubt I was any faster than my speediest walking, but let's not get technical. And I kept going...one block....2 blocks.....3 blocks......holy cow, I actually was lasting....4 blocks.....5 blocks......oh my goodness, this is so weird, but awesome and oh my gosh who am I going to call and tell when I get home? .....6 blocks.....can I make it another? I'm going to try...and I kept going until I just couldn't and it was pretty much 1/2 way the way back home. What a rush! A huge sense of accomplishment was filling my head as I walked the rest of the way home, except one block that I jogged again. About 2 1/2 blocks away from home I thought I'd try to jog the rest of the way but only made it about one block. I feel pretty good right now. Thanks for reading my story.