WHY YOU DO IT
This month I’m taking ‘medical leave’ and handing over to a guest I’ve known for thirty-one years: my daughter, Cristal. Since I’m an extremely proud mother, I could write a couple of pages on her brilliant achievements but I’ll spare you that. It’s sufficient to say that Cristal holds two Masters degrees, and currently works in Bogota, Colombia, for the International Organization for Migration, a branch of the UN. As she’s always been considered somewhat un-athletic (her swimming instructor called her “spaghetti legs”), I was obviously surprised when she took up running. When I asked her why, this was her response…
Running: the final frontier. Or perhaps I should say that writing about running is the final frontier, as I’ve never written about anything athletic in my life and much less about running, which I only took up six months ago!
I was visiting my mother in New York in October, 2014, and wanted to make sure that I got some exercise while I was there. We are lucky enough to live close to Central Park, so it seemed the obvious choice in terms of location. I had tried running a few times, some years ago, with little success – I never made it around the Jackie Onassis Reservoir (2.5 kilometers), and got bored quite quickly. This time, however, I decided to really give it my all. There were two reasons why. The main reason was that I had signed up for a 10k race to support UNICEF, in Colombia, in November, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it without some kind of training in addition to the short aerobic workouts I’d been doing at home in the months prior.
