Slightly Off Beat

How to get a chubby geek in to running

No one has ever mistaken me for an athlete.  I’m good with computers, but I am terrible at sports.  Also, my less-than-chiseled body usually gives me away.  I have always enjoyed physical activities and being outdoors but I never took much interest in competitive sports.  About two and a half years ago I decided to try running.  I put on my tennis shoes, picked a direction and “ran” for about 3/4 of a mile.  I hated it.  

Despite my initial negative experience, I have slowly learned to enjoy running.  The trick was that I had to find ways to make running appeal to my inner geek.  

Gadgets

My wife bought me a Garmin 305 for my birthday a couple of years ago.  It is a GPS enabled watch that can track my running speed, elevation, heart-rate and more.  If you keep an eye out for a sale you can usually get this watch for around 130.  There are newer, sleeker and more expensive models but this one has served me well.

Apps

There are several apps that assist with running but I think Runkeeper is the best.  Much like my Garmin watch, it can keep track of your distance, elevation, time, calorie burn and even your heart-rate if you have the right accessories.  After a run you can instantly upload to the runkeeper website and optionally share to your social networks such as twitter and facebook.  You can find my runkeeper profile here.  I don’t use Runkeeper much because of my watch, and I tend to use DailyMile to keep track of my runs, but more on that in a bit.

Stats and Numbers

The benefit of using a GPS watch or Runkeeper is that you get stats…a lot of stats.  Sites like Garmin Connect make it easy to review all of the nitty gritty details of your runs.  You can do cool things such as overlay graphs of your heart-rate with graphs of your elevation changes.  Visualizing the data made it a lot easier to track my progress and find motivation for my next run.

Community

Motivation is important and I haven’t found any better site than dailymile.com.  Runkeeper has better tools and more stats but the DailyMile community is what keeps bringing me back to the website.  Thanks to the Garmin Connect plug-in, I can easily sync my runs from my watch with the site.  I also found the community to be helpful when I was preparing for my first half marathon and had tons of questions.  You can find me on dailymile here.

Clarity

This is the number one thing that continues to bring me back to running.  When I run, I achieve a clarity of mind that I simply do not experience with other activities.  I’m not sure how to explain it.  Every run seems to provide me with creative break-throughs and “ah-hah” moments.  It is as though running strips away all distractions and my ADD and I am suddenly left with just my thoughts.  

I am not sure if I will ever be “good” at running.  If any real runner looked at my speeds and distances they’d probably laugh.  All i know is that with the right motivation, even chubby geeks like myself can learn to love running.