1,391. The number of days running since the end of what I jokingly refer to as my two decade anomaly. That is, the decades of my 30’s and 40’s when my focus and life shifted toward career and children and my weight drifted up and my fitness fell down.
I’ve recently skimmed a book, Go Wild, that describes very closely the approach that I gravitated to almost naturally once I said no sugar (not an absolute ban, but a general rule). As Ratey and Manning point out weight falls away once one cuts out sugar. Sugar and many of the processed foods that we eat today are in fact little more than recycled waste from the industrial agriculture industry. But. My point in cutting sugar really wasn’t to drop my weight – that was a happy unintended consequence. My point was to deal with the headaches and assorted pains and discomforts that comes from consuming an industrial poison.
People ask me if my running doesn’t cause my knees to hurt. That misses the point. My knees have never hurt so much as when I was eating industrial processed foods. Running takes me into a new domain of health and wellbeing. Earlier on in my renewed exploration of running I read Born to Run. A page turner first person account of discovering long distance running and an informative handbook rolled into one enjoyable read. Here was described an account of running without injury and at near elite levels. We are born, evolved, to run. Any other conclusion is one rooted in corporate ad campaigns and disinformation.
charlesruns 