It's Not That You Can't Run You Don't - It's Because You Believe Your Own Bullshit!

I love running. Something I could never do. Once upon a time I couldn’t walk up stairs from illness, that is one extreme. The other extreme is running over 25 miles with a bag of weights on my back. So how do you go from that point to this one? I’m tired of hearing people say “I can’t run, I’ve never been good at it”. Don’t get me wrong, if you are paralysed or suffering from some genuinely hideous illness, then fair game, but the majority of the time the problem isn’t physical, it’s mental, and here is why . . .

Like everyone else, I myself have been guilty of excuses, some of which I thought were legitimate. “Well, I cannot run, I’m a chronic asthmatic and take a steroid inhaler every day” – that was a superb excuse. The reality is when I stop running, my asthma is worse. Running enables me to hack up all the mucus off my chest – that all asthmatics will be familiar with. How many people won’t run because of asthma but will still smoke? I was one of them. Another excuse in my repertoire was “I’ve torn my ligament before, I have pins in my knee and an artificial graft – running is bad for the joints”. Well - at this point it’s probably worth mentioning that the very thing that got me running was WEED ADDICTION. I worked in a stressful job four miles away from home and if I got the bus in rush hour traffic it was an hour and a half before I got home. I had spliffs to smoke, I couldn’t wait that long. I started to jog home; at first it took me nearly an hour. Knee not so bad now eh Roberto? If you think about running and convince yourself it’s a chore, you won’t do it. If someone said to you “you live in Tang Hall, there’s five grand in cash waiting for you at a house in Acomb, but you have got to go by foot and you’ve only got 45 minutes to get there” – you’d be out of the door in a flash wouldn’t you? My point is weed in my case, was the “five grand in cash”, I had a selfish agenda to fulfil; I wasn’t driven by something mundane such as “keeping fit”. Soon that one hour became 50 minutes, then 40 minutes then half an hour. Thankfully, the weed stopped when I realised I was turning into a bit of a vegetable, but the running continued as my addiction had proven to me I was capable if I HAD to be. The irony of it all.

Modern society has a lot to answer for. People are too quick to encourage each other into being fat and lazy. “Go for a run, fuck that mate, I wouldn’t dare”. If you look at the Tarahumara, aka ‘The Raramuri People’, you will see that when age old traditions are not interfered with, physically we can prosper. The Tarahumara are Native Americans of north-west Mexico – a population of 50,000 – 70,000 who still live in caves and natural shelters made of wood or stone, their lifestyles untouched since the 16th century when they fled into the canyons on the arrival of Spanish invaders. Without any high-tech equipment or development through sports science, without media interference or all the other ills of a sloppy and luvvy-dovey society, this tribe run distances of up to 200 miles in one session. TWO HUNDRED MILES. Mo who?

As mentioned in the below video by Christopher McDougall (author of Born to Run), it is almost intrinsically part of our DNA that we are runners. Look at the Raramuri, their ability to run down deer and wild turkeys – how else did we hunt before the arrival of weaponry? You take a two year old and how often do you see them walk? As soon as a baby can stand upright, without prompting, it is within their nature to run. They run everywhere. It’s interesting as well that when you see toddlers lift; they naturally keep a straight back and bend their knees. Bad habits and attitudes aren’t within us, they are learned. This attitude of “I can’t run, it’s too hard, I’ve this and that wrong with me” predominantly is bullshit. It is our mental state that is wrong, not our physical conditioning. A pampered society where everything is now designed for ease – at a fundamentally simple level, clapping to turn off a light switch rather than getting off your arse and walking over to the wall to flick a button. What next? Before long we won’t have toilets as we know them. We will come home and plumb ourselves from our rectum into a vault which enables us to take a shit whilst we are sprawled on our settee watching Big Brother and quaffing on Ben n Jerry’s. It sounds insane but we live in a world where Donald Trump is the President of America . . .

(Almost) everyone has it in them to run, and one should not be disheartened by only being able to manage 30 seconds or so before crumbling into a wheezing mess. I put this down to bad form, almost all novice runners will head out of the door trying to run faster than they are able. If you don’t go running, start out with a pace that is little faster than a walk, the speed will come in time and it will happen without you even realizing it. Science tells us that regular aerobic training will increase the number of mitochondria in our cells, mitochondria being the “power generators”. Mitochondrion converts oxygen and nutrients into adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is the energy currency that powers a cells metabolic activity. How much you train determines how much mitochondria is in your cells and how intensely you train determines how powerful each unit of mitochondria is. In other words – stick at it, you WILL get better. Science tells us so.

SOME BENEFITS OF RUNNING

• You can do it pretty much anywhere • Saves you money on the gym • It’s a good excuse to eat more carbs  • Research suggests runners live longer • For a 160lb person – running can burn more than 850 calories an hour • Running will increase your confidence • Last longer in bed – you’ll not see a long distance runner tire out five minutes into a shag • Healthier skin – sweating can rid your pores of gunk • Running can decrease fatigue and give you an energy boost • Running encourages higher quality sleep • People who run for an hour a week reduce their risk of heart disease • Running has been proven to reduce stress and anxiety