How I learned to love running

I used to hate running.

Any time I had to run in high school, I tried to avoid it. It felt that I could barely catch my breath, and after run I couldn’t walk properly for a few days due to pain in my thighs.

These days I want to go running almost every day. What happened?

I used to have hard time sleeping at night and I couldn’t clear my mind after work. I realised that I needed to get some proper exercise—parking car further and take a walk, preferring stairs over elevator, or using stand-up desk wasn’t clearly enough.

But even when I was doing proper workouts for six months, my running hasn’t improved much. At this point I realised that simply being out of shape wasn’t the problem.

The problem was, that my running technique sucked. This is why I hated running so much—because I didn’t know how to run. Few running lessons corrected my biggest mistakes, and that changed things dramatically: while I used to feel nearly dead after running a mile, now I can run 5 kilometers in around 25 minutes—and feel great after. I used to take at least three days off after a run, and now I want to go for a run almost every day.

I learned, that even if you think you don’t like something, you might not be proficient enough to enjoy it. Take your time, understand that in the beginning you will do things wrong, but after you scratched the surface deep enough, you will find things that’ll surprise you.