Tag: fitness

Runner’s high

May 15th, 2025
Ok, I lied. The other day, when I said I don’t like running, I wasn’t thinking about the days when running feels like a drug, when it feels like an injection of euphoria straight to my heart and all my limbs and the joy part of my brain.

I took our son out for coffee yesterday after lunch when I thought I’d go mad with the endless rain. We went to a lively café and had cappuccinos in the afternoon, which I’m sure Italian friends everywhere are making faces about, but the foamy drink and hanging out with him lifted my spirits after three days of glum. We emerged from the coffee shop to sunlight on the sidewalk, on the street, and sparkling on wet cars. I looked up and saw a break in the clouds. I allowed myself to feel a glimmer of hope that maybe the gloom was finally going to end.

On an errand a little while later, I drove with the Miata’s top down under a newly blue sky, with sunglasses on and wind on my skin, and I felt like my happy self again.

This happy mood lasted into this morning, and is still going strong. I wrote for about an hour, then craved the high energy of a run rather than the slower amble of a walk. And I wanted to listen to music while I ran. I usually listen to podcasts, and I wasn’t in the mood to learn or ingest information or listen to someone talking in my ear. I just wanted to run and feel the good feelings I was feeling after happy time with my family, sunshine, and a good morning of writing.

Over the years, I’ve collected songs on an ever evolving playlist for running. I recently added some that have never been on my playlist, and I re-added songs that were on there more than 15 years ago when I trained for triathlons. When I started my run today, I felt light and happy. Once the music kicked in, I felt light and happy, Intensified. My heart filled, I was strong in my body, and I felt electric. I had zero cares in the world. I sang along to Freedom on the empty road. I danced on the path when the horns came in and then the bass dropped in Tokyo Drifting. I remembered how good it feels to dance and made a mental note to do it more.

I guess lucking into a runners high is like getting it right with any other kind of venture. The perfect photograph, painting, or blog post is not going to happen every time. In fact, most of a photographer’s shots, or artist’s paintings, or writer’s drafts, are going to be painful, bad, dull, or mediocre. But if you keep showing up, and all the stars align, and the sun comes out, and you’ve had a good time with your family, and the music’s pumping, and there’s a perfect confluence of events, sometimes, something fabulous might happen.

These were the songs that got me jazzed on my run today:
1. Pork Soda by Glass Animals
2. Bad Guy by Billie Eilish
3. Tokyo Drifting by Glass Animals
4. Freedom by George Michael
5. Vegas by Doja Cat
6. Close to Me by The Cure
7. Pa’l Norte by Calle 13
Love Letter to Swimming

November 14th, 2018

Dear Swimming,

As much as I complain about you — about the middle of the night wakeups, about the cost, about the 3-day swim meets where we spend 18 hours at the pool for 12 minutes of our daughter swimming — I love you dearly.

I abandoned you for many years. I used a tread desk for exercise when I got a full time job. Fitness was more efficient that way: I could exercise and work at the same time. I walked and typed and walked and typed and walked and had video calls.

When the treadmill died, I panicked about how I was going to fit exercise in. When the treadmill died, I also realized what a rut I was in. I rarely left my office. I rarely changed my perspective. I was always upright, always had access to air.

At the time, my husband was bringing our daughter to the pool for her early morning practices. It occurred to me that she is at the pool four days a week anyway — maybe that’s how I could get my exercise in: I could swim while she swims.

Now I’m swimming again, and how I missed you. I love using my shoulders and my hands to pull myself through blue water, like I’m flying, but through liquid. I love the murmur of bubbles by my ear as I exhale. I love the quiet of my mind in the pool. It’s so blessedly inactive I can barely even count laps. You are the closest I have ever come to meditating. Sometimes when thoughts do sneak in — thoughts other than how to move my arms or time my kick — the thoughts are of diving off the bow of our sailboat into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean one day when we retire. I’ll take my exercise in the sea surrounding our floating home.

I love the ocean, and you bring me closer to it.

But it’s not just for me that I love you. I love you for our daughter. As a sport, you are one of the healthiest I’ve encountered. There are rarely screaming sideline parents. The kids set personal goals that they have agency over — they are not dependent on others on the team to do their jobs, they are in charge of their own performance. They compete against their own times. You teach them discipline, you teach them commitment. They have pride in getting up before the world to practice (and they are adorable all sleepy eyed and bed-headed, waiting for the aquatic center staff to unlock the door at 5:30am). You allow boys and girls on the team to intermingle in a way I don’t see in other sports — they are together and friends rather than separated and avoiding each other. Something about that seems very healthy to me.

You’ve taught our daugher confidence and dedication. She is active because of you. She eats healthier because of you. She wants to be strong because of you. She improves because of you. She is part of a team because of you.

The sun hasn’t risen yet and I’ve already swum and showered. Our daughter continues her set in the pool below, sharing a lane with her best friend. We’ve been up since 4:40am, like we are every Wednesday and Friday. Some people hate mornings. I love them though. I love being up before the world, getting in a workout, and sitting in the bleachers afterwards, eating my yogurt and walnuts from a thermos while the sun rises. The whole day, the rest of my life, stretches out before me. And I want you in it.

Andrea
What matters now

April 23rd, 2014

What matters now is the sun. It is out, is is warm, it is shining on the days and I want to walk in it.

As I age, running hurts. It hurts my joints, it hurts my shins, it hurts my lungs and my throat. Likewise, exercise DVDs – the Jillian Michaels workouts that got me through winter – have destroyed my wrists so that I can barely bend my hands back; I can’t lay them flat on the floor to do a pushup – I have to form a fist.

I never walked for exercise because it wasn’t fast enough. I got bored walking. I’d find myself wanting to break into a run so I could get home faster, so I could get my exercise over with, so I could get to the real stuff of life: eating, writing, drinking coffee, laughing with my family. But now, after huffing and panting and shredding my joints in the dark cave of our basement, but now that I’ve begun listening to podcasts while I move slower than a run and gentler than burpees, but now with an aging body and a warming sun, I crave walks like I crave coffee and writing practice.

Because what matters now is sunshine. I see it slanting through our spring-cleaned kitchen windows, I see it warming our back deck, I see it dappling the tender new shoots in the park and lighting the flowering Appalachians and I want to be out in it. I want to enjoy it in a way that I don’t when I’m gasping for air on a run.

So now, in spring, I find time, I make time, I carve time out for walks in the hills with my headphones. For long walks in the spring sunshine that does my moody self such good.
¿Come se dice “kickass” en español?

October 7th, 2013

I was planning to run my first bike/run combo today, which is called a “brick” in triathlon lingo, because your legs feel like bricks when you try to run after riding a bike. But when I checked the forecast yesterday, it called for thunderstorms all day today, with an extra special treat of severe weather this afternoon, which here in Minnesota usually means tornadoes.

In the middle of the night, I woke to crashing thunder several times, with lightning flashing through the openings in the curtains, and every time I thought, “Go on weather. Get it out of your system now so I can wake up to clear skies.” I really didn’t want to ride and run in a lightning storm.

And when I woke this morning at 7 AM, this is what I saw through the slats in the blinds:

Blue Sky

You’d better believe I jumped out of bed to take advantage of it. Because what I couldn’t see from my bed was the ring of black sky all around the small patch of blue.

My bike ride was awesome, as bike rides always are, and I was tempted to take it even longer than my training schedule suggested (only 30 minutes – what’s the point in that?). But the sky was darkening back up, and I figured I should get back home and run before my luck ran out.

I dropped my bike off, changed shoes, grabbed my headphones, and took off running. At first I thought, “Bricks? What bricks? My legs feel totally normal. Like I didn’t even ride my bike!” By the end of the block it felt like someone had opened me up and poured lead into my waist. The heaviness seeped down my hamstrings, into my calves, all the way down to my heels and toes. Picking up my feet was like uprooting trees. And I thought, “This sucks.”

I looked at my watch and 4 minutes had gone by. Only 4 minutes? I’ve got to do this for 26 more minutes? What the hell was I thinking of signing up for a triathlon?!

The sky was grey and gloomy. No more blue skies and happy clouds. All I could think of was my friend Liv’s blog post, Three Ways to Make Blogging Suck Less, and how I wanted someone to inform me of three ways to make running suck less. Besides doing more running.

So I suffered and complained in my head, thinking about how much running sucks, until this song came through my headphones:

The clouds parted (for real!), I found my stride, and the Runner’s High commenced. My right foot fell on every down beat, in perfect rhythm with the music. I was swift, I was light, I was running, and it didn’t suck! I ran like a track star, like I’d been running all my life, like my legs were feathers. My stride lengthened. My shoulders loosened. My lungs opened. I grinned a stupid grin while I ran.

In short, I kicked ass.

I have no idea what the song is about, because my Spanish is no good, but I do know that that song lifted my feet and lightened my load, and it put me on cruise control for the remaining 20 minutes. The next thing I knew, the run was almost over, and James Brown’s Make it Funky came through to take me home. I feasted on homemade crepes and a perfect cup of coffee with my family as the sky opened up and poured its deluge onto the roads I had just ridden and run.

Originally written May 22, 2011 in Minnesota, when I was training for my first (and only) post-children triathlon, I thought this would be a good fit for this week’s Daily Post photo challenge: Good Morning! Also, Calle 13’s “Pa’l Norte” has this effect on me every time it comes on my iPod when I run. I’m kind of sick of my other workout music though. Do you have any favorite running tunes?
We bribed our son to exercise

July 17th, 2013

I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but we bribed our son to exercise. My husband came home from work the other day to find the kids still in their pajamas, racing up and down the stairs whooping and shrieking, wild as hyenas because they hadn’t been outdoors all day, and he was concerned. Our daughter works out in the pool three times a week for swim team, but soccer is on hiatus for the summer, and our son does nothing active. In fact, it’s four o’clock right now and he’s still wearing his pajamas. Again.

“Maybe we should think of some sort of reward system to encourage him to exercise,” my husband said. Unlike the neighborhood we left behind in Minnesota, where our back yard butted against the back yards of children our kids’ ages, where they’d spend 8 hours a day outside with friends, running, swinging, skipping, and jumping, our current neighborhood has no back-yard elementary school aged kids. And unlike the neighborhood where I grew up, where there weren’t a lot of kids, but my brother and I had endless marshes to tromp through, and island woods to explore, and a dirt road so rutted and so unused that cars weren’t a threat, our current neighborhood is not that exciting for a nine year old. There’s a toddler playground. And a bunch of townhouses. And some streets that are too high-traffic for me to feel comfortable with his sister and him wandering far from home without my supervision.

I, of course, felt like I was failing as a mother. “I could take them on more walks and bike rides,” I said.

“No, they need to be able to get exercise without depending on you to have to take them somewhere.”

“I could just make them go outside,” I said. I’m sure my mother sent my brother and me out when we had been indoors too long. But when I do make our kids go outside, I watch them through the front window and they wander around the tiny park, shoulders slumped, getting eaten up by mosquitoes, bored. I can’t really blame them. I would be bored too, without friends to play tag with, or hide and seek, or kickball, and without trees to climb or woods to explore.

A few days later, I mentioned to our son that we were concerned about his inactivity. “But I swam a lot on vacation,” he said.

“Yes, you did, that’s true.” It was true. He did. “But that was 6 weeks ago.”

“I’m really active when I’m in soccer,” he said. “I love running around in soccer.”

“I know you do, sweetie, but soccer doesn’t start for a few more weeks. It’s good for your body to move and get activity more regularly than just during soccer season. Three months off for summer is too long for your body to crouch on the floor playing LEGOs or sit in front of the TV.”

He had nothing to say to that.

“So Dad and I were thinking about coming up with a reward system for keeping your body strong. I know you don’t like exercising just for the sake of exercising – you like being active in a fun way, like in soccer. So during summer, when you don’t have as much opportunity for the fun stuff, we were thinking that we could encourage you to exercise by giving you something you value in return.”

His eyes lit up. “Like money?”

I sighed. “No, not money.” My shoulders slumped. “I am not going to pay you to exercise.”

I thought on it a few more days and finally came up with a reward I was willing to offer, and I knew he wouldn’t refuse.

“Okay buddy, how about this. You do 10 sit ups and 10 pushups every day for a week, and I’ll play a full game of Monopoly with you, beginning to end, on the seventh day.” I should be sainted.

“Deal!” he said. We never finish a game of Monopoly with him, and it’s the game he always wants to play (at 8 o’clock at night when we ask, “does anyone want to play a game?” and he says “Monopoly!” and we all groan.)

Today was the first day of this little experiment, and it was quite a treat. I realized very quickly that I was only requiring about two minutes worth of exercise for what could possible be four hours worth of reward (punishment), so I made him do burpees (a six-step pushup) instead of regular push ups. He giggled like crazy while he was doing them, knocking into furniture, laughing even harder when he got to number 7 and could barely do the push-up part. I giggled like crazy, too, watching his goonie smile while he jumped. He took a water break after that 60 second endeavor, and then I held his feet while he did his 10 situps. Every time his face came up to his knees, and we looked into each other’s eyes, we burst out laughing again.

It wasn’t much – 10 reps of 2 exercises, but it’s a start. At least we’re teaching him that fitness is important, that its something worth doing even when you don’t want to. That it can be funny when your mom is holding your feet, and you grunt when you crunch up, and you come nose to nose with her at the top and she’s grinning and you laugh. And that your family values your health enough that your mom is willing to sacrifice four (five, six?) hours of her life to play Monopoly with you, just for a week’s worth of burpees.
My reward for exercising on vacation

June 11th, 2013

Gulf of Mexico on a June morning, Anna Maria Island, Florida

Last night, after drinking rum drinks all afternoon, I announced to my husband, “I’m going for a run in the morning.” I rubbed my bloated belly. I packed everything I need for running – shoes, shorts, sports bras, iPod, running watch – and after a week of vacation eating (and drinking), and after a gluttonous day at Disney, all my gear still lay unused on the floor of the closet.

“Okaaay,” he said.

“Just saying it out loud so I’ll do it.”

I woke with the first rays of the sun, pulled on my running clothes, and sneaked silently out of our still sleeping condo. I headed across the street, away from the beach, started my stopwatch, and picked my feet up into a run. Poinciana trees and frangipani are in bloom on Anna Maria Island, and I ran neighborhood streets to see the lush greens and bright flowers of tropical plants. I often run on the beach while we’re here because I feel like I should – I always see runners on the beach and think, “Wow, what an idyllic place to run. Look at the scenery!” But the fact is, when I run on the beach my socks fill with sand, the slope hurts my ankles, and my heels sink in the softness, making the already arduous task of running even more annoying. Plus, it’s kind of torturous to be so hot and sweaty and miserable with all that turquoise water right next to me tempting me to abandon the run and just go swimming.

I jogged to the other side of the island – only about three blocks – to Marina Drive and ran up and down fingers of land separated by canals. Brown anole lizards skittered across driveways in the soft morning light, and a scarab beetle inched its way across 69th Street. I felt like the beetle when I looked at my watch and saw I had only been running 11 minutes.

Sweat trickled down my back as the sun rose over palm trees and its already strong rays struck my skin. I focused on oleander bushes in islanders’ yards and remembered of the oleanders my mom always grew on the coast of Georgia. Their fragrance was cool and sweet today in the warm morning air. I surveyed landscaping strategies as I ran by each home. The plants reminded me of landscaping our homes when we lived in Florida, of swiping sweat from our foreheads as we wandered native plant nurseries, piling coonties and porterweed, milkweed and firebushes onto our green pull cart.

When I finally turned around to head back to the condo, I started thinking about my reward for running on vacation. I ducked under the broad round leaves of an overhanging sea grape and trotted through St. Augustine grass to the docks along Marina Drive. I’ll take my hat off first, then my iPod and watch. I’ll hide those in my hat so nobody steals them. I glanced in the water between boat slips and saw a red hibiscus flower floating on the dark glassy surface. I looked beneath a dock and saw another, then another. They reminded me of Chinese lanterns floating down a river.

Then I’ll peel of my shoes, and then my socks. I passed a boat named Hanky Panky and smiled. A hibiscus flower floated next to it. The scene made me want to listen to Jimmy Buffett and drink more rum. Sweat trickled from my hair-line down my jaw. Only two more blocks til I earn my prize. I gasped in the hot sun. I’ll take my hair down, so it won’t get tangled in the elastic.

Finally, as soon as my feet launched off the sidewalk of 72^nd Street and landed on the asphalt of Gulf Drive, I stopped running. I panted and shook sweat off my arms as I walked across to the condo parking lot. I yanked off my hat and pulled ear buds out of my ear. I nestled my watch and iPod in my hat as I walked the short block over bleached pavement to the beach. At the edge of a sandy path through the dunes, I peeled off my running shoes, then my socks. I pulled my hair from its ponytail and made a little pile of belongings at the base of a sand dune. Then I walked across white sand into the beryl waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The water soothed my Disney-sore feet, and as soon as I was knee-deep, I dove in. My nylon running shorts fluttered underwater and I turned onto my back, my face to the morning sun. At 7:30 am, the beach was empty, and I was the only person in the water.

I floated in the calm sea, my palms up, my feet dangling, and the cool water was a balm on my hot skin. The Gulf was the perfect refreshment after a hot summer run in Florida, and I could feel my core temperature come down as the sea chilled my scalp. The salt water buoyed me, and I bobbed gently without any effort on my part. My hair drifted around my head, and with my ears underwater, I heard the muffled sloshing of wavelets on sand. I opened my eyes as I floated there and saw white terns swoop overhead. Laughing gulls, with black heads and black wing tips, circled and dived. I turned my head toward shore and saw a great blue heron idle near a fisherman’s bucket. A white ibis, with a curved orange bill, glided over the shallows to join it.

I floated there silently for a long time, alone in the cool calm of morning, blue sky above, blue water beneath, white sand to receive me when I was done. The reason I bring my running shoes. My reward for exercising on vacation.