Yes I can!

“Failure is all in how you define it:
Lessons from the Round the Bays”

By Tanja Gardner, Optimum Life Ltd
(reprinted)

No such word as "can't"?

Up until July 2004, I firmly believed I couldn’t run. I had a number of reasons for this – my body's built wrong for it, I’ve torn my knee kickboxing, and despite being fit in other ways, as soon as I even started to jog slowly, my lungs would seize up so badly people around me would think I was having an asthma attack.

I’d tried to teach myself to run before. More than once, in fact. Each time I’d tried, I’d ended up increasing the time I could comfortably run from its base level of something like 30 seconds, to a few minutes, but never to a level where I could use running as one of my cardio methods.

Last year, I got sick of hearing myself say ‘can’t’. I have two legs and two lungs. Both (give or take a piece of cartilage or two) are in good working order. So concluding I can’t run seems somewhat spurious. The part of me that can’t resist a challenge decided I must just need to find a new way to run… and so that I had something specific to aim for, I committed to entering (and running all of) the next “Round the Bays” – Auckland’s annual 8.4km fun run.

I did my research – took out a number of books on running, and joined various online forums and mailing lists. I created a training program for myself, based partly on the BUPA 5km training programme, and partly on the books I’d read. And I started training... (read the rest on http://optimumlife.co.nz/Fitness%20Articles/Failure/Failure.htm)

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RESOURCE INFORMATION:
© 2005 Tanja Gardner, Optimum Life Ltd. You are very welcome to use this article as content for your website, or forward it on to anyone you think may be interested, as long as you use it in its entirety, and include this resource information.

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