A Fat Kids Impossibilities Broken

I was never a physically active person before.In middle school when everyone was starting to take part in sports, I was too self-conscious to join or attempt in anything physically demanding. I was an overweight kid and after being teased and bullied I found refuge in the library. It led to my love of reading, but because I never really went out, my physique suffered. Not that I didn’t try, I remember in gym class going into the weight room with all the other guys but being embarrassed when I struggled to lift a fraction of what my friends could and being made fun of. This self consciousness carried on all the way into and after High school and left with me with a dislike for gyms.

However, It was during high school that I saw how everyone running on the track was just slow or unenthusiastic. Even those  who would throw me the occasional jab, would be struggling the mandatory mile. Where most of the class would walk, I would jog it. The way I initially viewed was that walking meant you have to be out in the Texas heat for a lot longer then if you were to simply jog it and get it over with.

I was in a goth/emo phase, so a black hoodie or jacket made the Texas spring heat even worse, so the faster I could get out of the sun the better.

Yet, as the class progressed I realized I would take less and less time, and before I realized I could finish it with out stopping while the other guys that I avoided would still be walking and complaining all the while how they’d much rather be in the weight room.

It was gratifying to see them walk as I lap them and wait for them inside the air conditioned gym or the stadium stands.

When I left for College, I had a appreciation for running. One of my friends who was a avid runner, heard how I enjoyed running, and so kept asking me to join him for one of his runs. He ran 3 times as much as I had ever tried, I never had really pushed myself on my runs, so being invited by him was daunting. Yet he kept asking me to join ensuring me he’d train me as long as I would be his running partner. Before I knew it I was struggling and coughing up a lung on my first day. I look back to that day with a huge grin. A wonderful memory, because after that day, I kept running. Every day we would keep increasing the distance. Till the distance of the first run was just a half of my total run.

It was empowering to hear and see peoples expressions as I would run into my dorm after a jog in nearly  freezing whether, snow, rain, or heat.Nothing kept me from my runs and every comment that came around the subject would float around how they hated to run, or could barley run a mile much less run my distances. It may have been the runners high but all this led up to a realization that I had fallen in love with running.

My younger self always thought it would be impossible that I would be involved in anything physically demanding. Yet when I found myself looking forward to every jog I pushed further and further. Every time I pushed further and increased my distances  it was always a extreme high. It was a impossibility that I just shattered, and brought up to question how much further could I go next time? What else is “impossible”? Could I really go that far?

Each time I always told myself, every run, ” Only one way to get there, just one more step more then yesterday, one more step, one more step and that impossible is possible, one more step”