And suddenly we were to remain at home, socially distance, sanitize… and hopefully not go stir crazy over it.

I have been very lucky in that, during the lockdown (and all that followed) we had a treadmill. We had just gotten the thing and, while I’m 1. prone to walking outdoors whenever I can and 2. not a runner, it was fortuitous. (And the source of many a ‘hamsters in a cage’ joke at our house for March-May 2020.)

Months back, in the depths of all this staying-at-home, I decided I should take up running again. My tricky heart was driving me a bit mad and I thought that, maybe, I could work myself out of some of the odd blips and flips it was prone to if I put enough miles in me.

Now, I’m a terrible runner. Really really terrible. So most of my runs were mostly walking punctuated by short sprints. This went on for a good many months. But I was running! That counted for something.

And I had fun doing it. YouTube virtual running vids became my carrot-on-a-stick. I’ve been all over the world without leaving my house.

A quick shoutout to my fav video for running:

By July I had managed my first “10 minutes of uninterrupted running” in my adult life.

And then, through a fun little series of interconnected Tweets, I found out about the current 221km challenge from Medal Mad.

So I joined that challenge in August. How could I not???

I’ll have you know, though, 221km in 90 days is a LOT of running. A lot MORE than I had been doing… (and I thought I was doing splendidly these many months.)

So here I am, a hamster on a wheel of sorts. Doing a 5k every other day, on average.

I have been taking walks outside, too, with the coming of autumnal temps. But, apparently, in spite of everything, I have become a runner at long last.

(Wish me luck in finding that finish line. I’ll get a keen t-shirt, too. )