The First Step

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or so some old Chinese dude said. No, I’m not going to run a thousand miles, but probably by the time the sun sets on June 6, somewhere around 580. Well according to Four Months to a Four-Hour Marathon that is. (Snappy title don’t you think?) So anyway the first step in this running adventure is to find a plan, a genius running program whereby I simply follow a 16 week-long formula, increase my mileage, get faster and avoid injury. Easy.

With this in mind I head to Borders, join some peevish neighbors in the Self Help section and dive into the immense running canon. Well, apart from it turns out that the running canon is neither immense nor canon like. In fact it’s plagued with books that despite their punchy titles hold entire chapters of completely state-the-obvious information and useless factoids. Sorry David Kuehls, author of the aforementioned Four Months to a Four-Hour Marathon, you apparently write for Runner’s World and are probably a hugely more accomplished runner than I will ever be, but your book should be relegated to a section called “ Publications That Should Really Just Be Pamphlets”. I did however learn that Oprah ran her first ever marathon in 4 hours. Not sure if that’s inspirational or de-inspirational if there’s such a word.

I left Borders with a book about Coco Chanel and not about running ( it’s a pretty good read actually). The quest continues. I then went and ran 5 miles on the Silver Strand.