Published in On Our Selection News, November 17, 2016

I started jogging again after about four weeks of sedentary life and it has nearly killed me.

I’m not saying I used to be a super fit person, but only a few months ago I was a very keen runner. I’ve never been able to use my abs for a cheese grater, my buns have never been compared to steel and Des (my left arm) and Troy (my right arm) have never had enough power to destroy anything other than a good parmy. But did like a good jog.

Which is weird because as a child, I hated running.

At my first school we had enough students to warrant the services of a district P.E. teacher, who insisted on us exercising.  He’s an absolutely lovely guy in real life, but was terrifying to a bookish chubster like me who used to get tired walking home from school (literally around the corner, about a 400 meter journey). His short, shrill whistle still echoes in my brain.

Thankfully, his visits weren’t that frequent and the only racing I would do was the tuckshop donut-eating race, which I recall winning often. But when I moved to my other school (around the other corner) I was in for a rude shock.

I guess our school was too small for a regular P.E. teacher at the time, so our principal would make us run a lap of the oval every morning to prevent childhood obesity and cut a few corners. Now, our “oval” was a long-grassed back paddock with a track mown into it, the length of which determined by whoever did the slashing. It was roughly 800 metres from memory, but to a short-legged, short-tempered me, it was a marathon track. I’d seen Paradise Road and likened the daily run to that scene when the women are herded together and marched through the countryside by soldiers.

One day I took to the track and was, strangely, ahead of my fitter, cuter friends. I remember running while turning to talk/pant to them. I wasn’t watching where I was going and was made abruptly aware of this fact when I felt a huge whack to my body.

I’d run into a tree and snapped it clean off at it’s stump.

The tree was only about as thick as the average adult’s neck but still. If ever you needed a symbol of my sheer size and dislike for running, this was it. I knocked over a whole tree just to get out of it.

Luckily I was in a Catholic school with a pretty hands-on stance against playground bullying, so no one made fun of me for being able to plough down a tree like an angry elephant.

Thankfully, I overcame my dislike of running in uni, when I had lots of spare time compared to my friends who did real degrees and was drinking far too much beer to look good in a cut-out dress. I started running in my first year and have enjoyed a good jog ever since. I even used to run before work during winter – crunching over the frost on the ground to keep my rig from getting too sloppy. I used to wonder why I hated running so much as kid. But I say that in past tense. Used to.

Because after just one month of doing nothing, I am that sweaty, puffed kid again, looking to run into a tree to avoid continuing. Thank goodness cut-out dresses aren’t fashionable anymore.