I hate running.

Running is not for everyone. Hell, it should be considered as a high risk occupation by insurance companies. Becoming a Fugu chef or a Jedi Knight is a child's play compared to the mastery you need to become a runner.

Why would you chose that sordid path? It happens to all of us. You see it coming miles away. Yet, you will deny it until your third visit in two months to the orthopedist. There you are, sitting in pain, holding a bag of ice and the shreds of your ego in your hands because you yield to your first middle age crisis. Broke to buy the red vintage convertible, and too much of a gentleman to have a mistress, you opt to become a runner. You will find yourself telling yourself, no, lying to yourself, "its easy, affordable and healthy", and just with that you decide to run."Run forest run". Crap. Running is not easy. It requires a lot of discipline, resilience, and determination. Three characteristics that, lets face it, if you really had, you wouldn't be in this mess. You wouldn't have indulged in those years of binge drinking or gluttony, to say the least.


As for affordable, have you tried to just buy some running shoes, a t-shirt and a pair of shorts under a budget? A kid walking out of a candy store has better chances of being happy with his choices. There is running gear for every discovered and yet-to-be-discovered weather condition. "Winter, spring, summer or fall, all you have to do is run and I will steal you" should be the jingle of all the brands out there. Because deep in our contrarian, anticapitalist, closet-hipster-heart, we might pretend to avoid those greedy, evil, soulless corporates, but we need to have proper uniform to join the "thundering herd" of joggers that will be running the latest town race.

And the healthy part? Well, because now you have the pressure to use all your new gadgets, and shine the world with your new twenty five layer outfit to run outside during the coldest winter recorded (because of course even mother nature wants to show you how dumb your idea is) you have now ran too much and you start by having ankle sprains and achilles tendinitis. Then it starts heading up, shin splints, runner knees, iliotibial band syndrome, piriformes syndrome. You will never, ever find yourself "googling" so much. First to find your latest ache symptoms, and then of course researching why it really is not cancer.


But the reason I think running is a high risk occupation is because there you are, running, pushing yourself to go further, and further, and further, and each minute you add, each second by which you increase your endurance, is another second you have to spend alone with yourself and with your own thoughts. That kind of solitude is not for the faint of heart. And boy is it really dangerous for you to be left alone with someone, well, someone like yourself.