Now that I have my handy little MP3 player, I'm trying to take up running. So far so good: I've done it twice this week so far. The problem: I'm an unbelievably bad runner. Always have been. In first grade I remember being the second slowest runner doing laps, and the kid who was the slowest only was because he'd just had his appendix removed.
But I've decided that since I have one of the world's prettiest running spots available to me, now that the weather's gotten nice, I have no business not taking advantage of it. So I've taken to running around the Charles. From the law school I go up a block to the BU Bridge, which I cross, and then I run along Memorial Drive until the Harvard Bridge. It's about .9 miles between the bridges on that side, so if I include the BU Bridge part I can do about 1.1 miles on my run. And I can do it. I don't feel so hot while I'm doing it, but I can get through it and then later in the day my body will falsely remember having enjoyed it...
Once at the other bridge I walk back across to Boston (.4 miles) and then walk back to the school (1.5 miles). The whole loop takes me about an hour and passes me by an awful lot of waterfowl and fish (the Canadian geese are a bit boring but the squadron of large white geese (or are they ducks?) that live underneath the BU Bridge on the Cambridge side are pretty interesting). Hopefully once I get used to it I'll be able to up the mileage by perhaps adding on the Harvard Bridge leg. (And it would of course be a thrill, and completely unprecedented, if I could do the whole thing...) Of course, the real challenge will be to keep the routine up. So far so good, but exercise regimens are tricky things to stick with, especially when life keeps trying to pull you in all sorts of other directions. But the fact of the matter is that I was way too sedentary last semester, and it shows. So I want to nip those behaviors in the bud while it's still not too hard to do, and thus regular exercise is now one of my top priorities for the summer. We'll see how this goes.
There is also the possibility of joining the gym. My access to the nice new BU facility runs out tomorrow, so I'd have to pay to use it. But I'm not sure it's worth the money. I will get to swim a bit anyway because I just signed up to teach a few swimming lessons (yay!), but I'm not sure it's worth the money for the access to weights and such. Maybe if I had more time, but I'm afraid to make a huge commitment until I can get a grip on how much bar review will suck from me. I think it would be better to do a little each day than take on too much, get overwhelmed, get behind, feel guilty, and then stay home. Even a little exercise is much better than sitting on my ass, so I think I'll take what I can get and be happy with it.
I will, however, try to find some exercises to do at home (even if just sit-ups and push-ups), eventually try to add in some biking, and try to keep up the running. If I can manage to do it regularly it will be such an accomplishment. Plus running around the Charles makes me feel like Banacek...
Edit 5/31: Oooo.... wicked cool Google hack! (To use the local lingo...) Paul Degnan made a pedometer tool using Google maps so now you can figure out how far you've run/walked/unicycled much more painlessly than entering different intersections into Yahoo maps, which is what I had to do yesterday in order to calculate the mileage. Seems I was pretty accurate though...
(I read about this tool in the June 2006 issue of New England Sports magazine. In an article about blogging about jogging, actually...)