我非常讨厌跑步,直到50岁我改变了这一点
On Feb. 1, 2018, I put on a pair of sneakers and went for a run for the first time in more than 30 years. To say I was never a runner is a mild way to sum up a life of active antipathy to the activity. Exercise was never my thing - undertaken periodically, at best, in an effort to force my body to become a smaller size. Yet here I was in my 50s, feeling heavy and out of shape, in a pair of sneakers I bought when I took tennis lessons in 1999 and an oversized neon pink sweatshirt, gasping my way again along the pavement. I blame technology. It was my computer that got me to run again - and not just because sitting at it for years without exercising had gotten me into bad shape. On social media, I vicariously followed other people's fitness successes: an overweight mom who became a marathon runner, a friend who walked and ran off half her body weight, a music critic colleague who tweeted her day's playlist after each run. Online, I kept seeing articles about the benefits of exercise; if it were an over-the-counter drug, one doctor said, everyone would buy it. And then there was an app: Couch25K (that's "couch to 5K"), a program that led you from Square 1 to running five kilometers in just eight wee. In my supposedly busy life, joining a gym had always seemed like an insurmountable hurdle. But I can always download an app. Then I met up with one of my oldest friends for breakfast. "I've started running," she said, and maybe that, coming from a lifelong habit of sisterly competition, is what pushed me over the edge and got me actually to start a couple of weeks later. And the beauty of running is that it's solitary - nobody has to know how long you've been doing it. Winded? For all that passerby knows, you've already run five miles. Or so you tell yourself. |