Time for a run

Today is one of the days I look forward to the most every year - the annual OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini Marathon in Indianapolis!  This is my third year running it, and I am so, so excited!  (By the time this is published, I'll hopefully be more than halfway finished.)

I got into running when I was reading up about my future hometown, Indianapolis, on Wikipedia.  One of the little tidbits they mentioned was that Indianapolis is home the largest half marathon in the country.  So I figured I would make it a goal of mine to run that half marathon.

When I first thought about signing up (Summer 2008), I could not even run a mile.  Seriously.  When I was in sixth grade, we had to run a mile as part of the Presidential Fitness Challenge (or something like that).  Kids in my class were finishing in 6 minutes!  I didn't even get to finish, because I ran out of time.  I think I walked about three-quarters of a mile, and then they made me stop because I was taking too long.

I pretended to join the track team for literally a day in high school.  I think that was mostly because I wanted some sweet, sweet Umbro shorts though.  I showed up for track practice and they told us just to go run.  I went home instead.

So I'm not exactly what you'd call a natural runner.  I have to work at it, sometimes very hard.

But I stuck with it, and the girl who almost 3 years ago couldn't even run a mile is about to run 13.1 today, for the fifth time.  Not too shabby, I'd say.