I ran today. So I skipped Thurs­day and Sat­ur­day, but what­ever. It’s bound to hap­pen some­times. What’s worse is that I made cook­ies all day yes­ter­day. Haha. Good way to keep to the goal. But this morn­ing I woke up after hav­ing dreams of Star Wars and Sith lords, and I made myself go out for a run. It was later in the morn­ing than I wanted, but I did it any­way. The sun was out, it was past 60 degrees, and the Pan­han­dle was full of peo­ple. One rea­son I like to go out early in the morn­ing is that the park isn’t so full of strollers and dog walk­ers. They hog the path and expect every­one else to get out of their way. But I’m not going to rant. Pub­lic space is public.

I did my inter­vals, wish­ing I could do more than just a minute at a time, but my legs were adamantly opposed to any­thing my brain asked for, so I did just what I was sup­posed to do. I can’t hurt myself again and take six months off to recu­per­ate. It felt good, regard­less. My legs are a lit­tle sore, they’ve got that kind of warm feel­ing that sore mus­cles have. I don’t know that feel­ing too well, and I like it. Is this part of the “high” that peo­ple talk about? My god, I want my legs back. I used to have really nice legs when I was younger. I’m glad I built up that mus­cle tone in my youth.

While I was show­er­ing, two things occurred to me: one, sweat­ing is so good for your pores — my skin always feels so much more clean after I sweat; and two, I should really add walk­ing to the days when I don’t run. There is no rea­son why I need to take the whole day off, and even the experts (in my head) say you shouldn’t take a full day off unless you’re injured. Fur­ther, get­ting up at the same time every day, which I already do, will strengthen my habit and make it eas­ier to keep up the early morn­ing runs. If I left by 7 a.m., I would have plenty of time in the morn­ing to exer­cise and get ready for school. And I would avoid all of the other peo­ple in the park, except for the hard­core run­ners and the speed rac­ers on bikes on their way to who knows where.

In other news, grades for the fall semes­ter came out. I got two A’s and a B: health, his­tory, and phi­los­o­phy, respec­tively. So yay for me.

Today I started run­ning again. I have started run­ning three times now (?), and I’ve never been able to make it work. I always chicken out for some rea­son. But I’m tired of being fat, so I’m gonna make it work. New year, new goals, right? I am using the book Run Your Butt Off writ­ten by a few of the edi­tors from Runner’s World mag­a­zine. It’s a tiered approach toward a goal of run­ning con­sis­tently for 30 min­utes. They start out with inter­vals, walk­ing a few min­utes run­ning a few min­utes, until you can build the sta­mina nec­es­sary for sus­tained run­ning. I have made it as far as step 4, what­ever that is, I can’t remem­ber right now, but that’s where it ends. So I’m start­ing over again, but at step 2. Step 1 is walk­ing for 30 min­utes straight. I’ve been doing that for­ever, and if New Year’s is any indi­ca­tion, I’m still pretty good at it – we walked home from the Lone Star because there were no cabs or buses to be found. It’s a nice walk, when you’re drunk. Any­way, step 2 is walk­ing for four min­utes, run­ning for one. I have made a playlist for my iPod with a bunch of songs that are 4 min­utes, plus or minus, where I walk, and a cus­tom track of one minute of silence, where I run. I do this for a week or so until I’m com­fort­able with it, and then I advance to step 3. It’s pretty effec­tive, and I really like it. I just have to keep going.

So, this morn­ing, Wii Fit mea­sured me at 243 pounds. Ugh. What a num­ber. My goal is 180-ish, but any­thing under 200 would be great. I hope that by putting this out to the world (and who­ever reads this), I will moti­vate myself to run and lose weight and keep this record of the experience.

So, happy new year, and that is all.