Fun Run in the Sun

Joy here...Every holiday season ends up being a season of indulgence.  We eat too much; we drink too much; we buy too much; we give too much; and we generally have too much of all good things out there. What happens then at this time of the year is that the athlete - be it a serious athlete or someone just trying to prevent herself from bursting out of her pants à la Joy 2009 - has a hard time sticking to a regimen of healthy eating and routine activity.

Early morning in the park.

This blog started in 2010, because in 2009 I spent the Christmas holiday season in Malaysia, stuffing myself silly for two weeks, and then exploded out of all my clothes.  Nomi and I looked at each other, looked at our midsections, and were signed up for our first ever running race, the 10km Sundown race in Singapore.  Then last year I spent the holidays in Canada, stuffing myself silly for an extended four-day weekend of indulgence, and then felt like exploding out of all my clothes.  This year, we're back in Malaysia, and I am well on track to meet (or even beat) my record of bursting out of my clothes!

We've been eating and drinking our body weight nearly every day.  'Tis the season, right?

The typical running loop...

The upshot of all this eating, all this drinking, is that we've also being doing a fair bit of running.  Instead of just sitting around on the couch all day, we've done two runs around the golf club where I've run with The Man and with Nomi before, where monkeys roam freely.  Instead of trying to run loops and loops there, we stuck to two 30-ish minute runs in our five finger shoes so that we can build up our distances as barefoot runners.  Then we've done two runs around the park where Nomi and I usually run.  These runs have been 40-ish minutes, so that's our new distance in the barefoot shoes.  And I can say, that at the end of each 40-minute stint, I wish that I was going to keep on going.  I feel like I want to keep running, and so stopping feels more like an act of restraint, to be careful with these new shoes, rather than an exhausted cessation of activity due to organ failure (which is kind of how I'm used to feeling at the end of a run; this new, invigorated feeling is kind of neat.).

...it even looks cool, doesn't it???

Here in Malaysia we're experiencing what everyone calls "Christmas weather," which feels nothing like the white Christmas in Canada that I'm used to, but which is truly lovely.  There is this fantastic breeze most days, and in the morning, the temperature has been known to dip as low as 23 C!  It's positively balmy.  So with the refreshing breeze and the sun high but not too hot, we've really been able to have fun with our little barefoot shoes and reinvigorate our running.

Now, I'm not foolish enough to think that a few 30 or 40 minute runs here and there will be enough to counter the Christmas eating frenzy, or overcome the fact that one glass of wine has about 200 calories, and on any given day I've been consuming 5-12 glasses of wine (sometimes even more, but after 12, I stop counting...or rather, I lose the ability to count!).  I know that I've been eating and drinking much more than I've been working out at any kind of intensity.  I get it.

But what I mean to say here is that even with all the eating, all the drinking, and all the pants-splitting indulgence, I've been able to rekindle my love of running and just head out there into the tropical "Christmas weather" and run with my pink barefoot shoes making me feel like a kid again - a kid who loves to just run and run and run purely for fun.

Joy - just running for fun!

Over and out,

Joy