Conquering jogging

TODAY let me tell you how I discovered jogging at middle age. Yes, I crossed the age bridge a couple of years ago, but on the other side of the bridge, I am still on the safe side of 40. If from 40 I was to start counting zero, I would say I am about four, five or six years old now.

I am trying to be clever so that you don’t guess my exact age, but will be stuck on a range of forty four to forty six.

A child starts learning new things at around four to six years of age and so this new child that is me decided to try something new.

For a first, when I started jogging a few months ago, I couldn’t last for more than one minute without gasping for breath.

But you see, when you want to accomplish something, you have to come up with a strategy.

I came up with one, whether you guessed it or not, I chose to practice on seldom used paths, paths I could use without meeting any people.

In these remote paths, I could even stop jogging and lie on the road if I wanted to, without anybody laughing.

And then I decided that I was teaching myself to jog the wrong way, like somebody trying to start school at university instead of at Grade One.

So I thus decided to stop jogging and try pace walking. Yes, ukutshitsha.

So that’s what I did. For some weeks, I would go to the jogging paths and fast walk the whole way.

Of course I didn’t like seeing these athletic young men and women joggers zipping past me and sometimes I wanted to race after them, but I knew that would be in vain, my legs were not yet ready.

When I was 16 I once competed at White City Stadium in the two rounds race. I don’t exactly remember how many metres or kilometres that was. I didn’t win the race and neither did I lose it, but representing my school at that event is one of the proud highlights of my childhood.

Even though I once competed for my school, afterwards I immediately forgot about it or anything called athletics.

The only time you could find me running at that time was at the bottle store with a policeman hot on my trail.

So, I fast walked for a couple of weeks but on this one day I found myself jogging, it was a natural transition.

But still I was wheezing, after a couple of minutes. What to do? I applied strategy gear number two. And this was what I termed “jolking,” meaning jogging and walking.

I would jog, walk, jog, and walk until I completed my training.

This I did for a couple of weeks too and still on those remote paths where there was the occasional athletic jogger, but not many.

I found that I was now enjoying the experience, because after every session, I would be feeling like Usain Bolt, when he had just won a race.

I even imagined myself outracing Bolt in some big world competition.

It’s allowed to dream the impossible, especially if it’s for motivational purposes.

I jog three times a week in the morning, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to be precise.

I was advised by a friend to Google a jogging sequence or routine for beginners. The manual advised that one shouldn’t run every day; otherwise risk straining a muscle or two.

It stated that one should skip a day in between every session so as to let the muscles rest and build.

So there I have given you advice if you want to be the next Samukeliso Moyo or Maria Mutola.

To wrap up this “how to start jogging” tutorial, again after a couple of weeks of jolking, one day my feet told me “you can now jog the whole way without stopping man.”

What did that mean? Of course, it meant that I could now graduate from the remote paths to the ones where its joggers festival and run with confidence.

Lesson, every task has a stuttering start, but with determination and lots of love for it and its environment, you can reach its peak and get that smile plastering your face.