Why did you start running

To get out of doing chores around the house as a teenager.

My mom comes from the old school of "Idle hands are Devil's workshop", so I joined cross-country. Turned out I was faster than average, so I stayed.

Dad ran. Brother ran. Sister ran. Family thing.

My parents dropped me off at the city track meet when I was 8 with my older sister. When they picked me up I had won the 50 and 100 yard dash in City Record times and the next day I was on the front page of the local newspaper crossing the tape. The rest was history!

I tried basketball, baseball, football, the mainstream sports as a kid. I wasn't good at any of them really. I lacked the coordination to succeed at ball sports. After I finished elementary school I realized that I had pretty good leg speed and decided that I was gonna pursue running, since I thought if I trained hard enough I would eventually get good. So I started jogging a few times a week, really really slowly at first (like 10min pace). I ran around 7 flat for the mile in middle school, but by the end of freshman year I was running low 2:1x for 800m. Now I'm a soph with a 4:58 mile PR and continuing to improve. Its been fun so far, besides some really bad races and injuries.

When I figured out I wasn't competitive at anything else. And when I wasn't competitive at running, I started jogging. It's my hobby.

I started running because I was constipated. I figured if I ran it would loosen some things up in the large intestine, it worked! Been running ever since and been hemroid free too.

My SO one day told me that I was going to start running with her. While she is gone, I am still running.

In college, a girl I liked said she ran track in high school. I suggested we go on a run together. I stopped seeing her when I found out she had a floppy vagina, but I kept running.

lol

My JR High had 3 sports. Football, Basketball, and Track. I was a tailback in football, point guard in basketball and ran the 880 in track. In football when we ran a couple laps around the field for conditioning at the end of practice, I always won. In basketball, I never got beat doing suicides. When I got to high school, baseball was a spring sport, but I was a much better runner than baseball player (even though I went 12-0 as a little league pitcher) so I went out for xc and track. I played basketball the first 2 years of high school but the best thing I did was quit and run a bunch of indoor meets my junior year. My times really went down that year.

Hurricane Andrew

I was terrible at soccer and did not make the select team two years in a row in 5th grade while all my friends made it on the team, I decided soccer wasn't for me.

I decided to switch to running because I thought it would get me into shape.

In the 3rd grade a group of my friends destroyed an older group of boys hidden fort in the fields. While we were still there pulling the thing apart the owners showed up.

I got chased by one older boys for a couple of minutes until he gave up. all the other kids got caught and punched around. What a rush to out run an older kid and feel the heart pumping and being out of breath.

I was a straight-A student. In junior high, we had to run 3/4 mile for time once a week. To get an A, you had to run faster than 4:50 or so. After 2 years of weekly time trials, I ran 4:10, and the HS cross country coach invited me to try running in high school. It took me a few weeks in September to realize that people wore running shoes for distance running, that they ran longer than 3/4 mile, that they ran every day, and that starting to run in September rather than July was a bad idea. I was ready to quit after 6 weeks or so when I finished top 15 in a freshman race and won some minor award. So I stuck with it.

I was a loner, still am, instead of playing on the playground in elementary school I did laps around it (mostly walking) and just stuck with it, my dad also use to run.

When I got into middle school I wanted to play football, but my mom wanted me to run xc cause I was fat. So I ran xc and made a lot of friends so I did track and now running is just kind of a part of my life now