history of my running life

I was an unathletic nerdy kid with hopeless hand-eye coordination, but I bicycled for fun and swim a bit; I was on the town swim team and a couple of times I didn't come in last. I had mild scoliosis and managed to parlay that into a doctor's excuse to get out of gym in junior high and high school. When I had to take a semester of sports in college I chose fencing, partly because swordfighting sounded cool, partly because the instructor was cute. (We dated for a couple of weeks after the semester was over. He turned out to be a jerk.)

After college I started dating a guy who was seriously into bike racing. He would go for a 40-mile ride and then come pick me up and we'd do a sedate 10 miles that would leave me exhausted. We moved to another state together to go to grad school in 1986, just as the triathlon started becoming popular, and I decided I might suck less at three sports put together than I did at each one individually. (Also, my boyfriend didn't swim, so he couldn't compete with me.) I hadn't actually done any running before, ever, but that didn't stop me. What almost did was my first training run, when I got horrible shin splints after 2 miles, but I persevered and managed to complete a sprint triathlon.

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If there is a moral to this story (which there isn't intended to be; this is just a bit of rambling, a memoir, a nostalgic review) it is this: do stuff you like, and keep doing it, even if you suck, and you will improve. Of course the better you are at it to begin with, the more you're likely to enjoy it and train and practice and so on. But not all the people up on the podium getting awards started out as athletic prodigies who ran cross-country in high school. Some of them were nerdy little kids like me.