Unwrapping the dork

Lucky Legs asked me what a dork is. Well I checked with dictionary.com and was surprised to find a listing. I found out that a dork was a silly, foolish, or inept person. I certainly felt like that after my weather forcasting efforts last Saturday.

Responding to my post on creative running Tesso asked if I started running when I resided in southern Africa. In fact, that is exactely the way I started. In 2000, I was in the third year of my three year diplomatic posting, in Zimbabwe to be precise. In September of that year, a very home sick Tuggeranong Don watched the Sydney Olympics on South African cable television and felt very uncomfortable. There was me: in excess of 90kgs, a sloth who breathed hard just thinking about exercise. There was them: these incredibly fit, superbly toned athletes, who seemed to epitomise perfection in the human form. Yet we are really all the same aren't we? Why can't I be like them?

And so it began.

One step at a time, one kilometre at a time, I started running. At first all I could manage was a short 2km puff, nothing more than that. But I kept going. The next day I pushed a little further, and then a little further the next, and so on. I had tried running before but no matter how hard I tried my efforts seemed to fail amid lack of motivation, injury or illness. This time, however, I introduced my two golden rules of running. Rule one is I never run on Mondays. Rule two is I never run the same course for two days in a row. I would always run a different route for each day of the week. Five and a half years on, these rules remain central to my running creed. I am not sure why these rules worked; perhaps it has something to do with variety being the spice of life. I don't know why; I just know it worked for me.

Anyway, nine months after taking up running at the age of 40 I had reduced my weight from 90 kgs to 64 kgs and was back home in Australia preparing to race in my first half marathon. In October 2000 soon after I started running I entered in a 10k race and my flat out best time for it was 59mins. Nine and a half months later as a much trimmer and fitter Tuggeranong Don I had lowered my 10k PB by almost twenty minutes to 41.30 (it is currently 40.09).

At an age when many guys are confronting widening girths and mid-life crisises I was becoming reborn. Aside from family issues, this was the most exciting thing to happen to me in my life. The angels started singing, manna came down from heaven, and the trumpets heralded my metamorphisis. This was my moment. I had arrived. I was a runner.