I love the fact that my entire body has changed because I'm a runner. I've always had some curves, but it's amazing what a little sculpting does for a woman's ego. And apparently, my body isn't the only thing being positively affected by this very physical hobby.
I've already mentioned that my two younger brothers were pretty good runners. One of them is straight up amazing when he's in top training condition. That particular brother - Andy - hasn't always been good at everything the way he is today.
When Andy was a kid, he was incredibly accident-prone. From memory, he's had a broken leg, a broken collar bone, four broken arms, a near-miss pencil-toward-his-eye incident, a minor pitchfork incident (my fault; don't ask)... I'm probably forgetting something, but you get the idea. And for a long time, he was relatively ADHD and school was not his thing. Especially not when he had two broken arms at the same time and my mom had to take a leave of absence from teaching to home school him since he could barely write. Mom once joked that if you asked him to read a book for 10 minutes, he couldn't do it, but hand him a shovel and tell him to go outside, and he'd dig a hole for two hours. We kind of just thought that school would never be his thing.
The older of my brothers - David - started running Cross Country in junior high. And when Andy was in fifth grade, he had nothing better to do as we sat around waiting on David to get done with practice, so he started running at practices with the team even though he couldn't actually compete.
That year, the team ran a charity 5k as extracurricular practice for the season. Andy wanted to run it, and our dad figured he'd run along with Andy, staying back with the 10-year-old.
Andy took off and left our dad in the dust. And he ran so hard that he vomited after he finished. Strangely enough after that reaction, he was hooked.
By high school, his grades were drastically improving. Mom started doing some research. She found out that running can increase brain function and focus capabilities. By the time he graduated high school, Andy was getting consistent A's. Now he has almost completed his studies to be a high school Math teacher, and he's paid for a large part of his education with scholarships. And Mom's pretty convinced that running is what made the difference.
This is just one personal story about how running has changed someone's life. I can only assume that as I increase my speed and distance, I'm slowly picking away at my own attention deficit problem. Don't get me started on how running drastically improves my attitude and mood (well, you can get me started, but I'm saving that for my next post).
For a pretty extensive summary of how running can improve many areas of life, check out this awesome Men's Health article. And for a post regarding a UCLA study showing that increased running speed increases learning in the brain, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment