I Ran Today (13)

R. James Miller
6 min readDec 13, 2022

And a lot of other days during the past week

Photo by sporlab on Unsplash

It has been a very good week plus of running for me. Not so much a good week of writing, however. I admit I’ve been super stressed about earning money for the past week, so I was working 12+ hour days and letting writing fall by the wayside. I had to let something suffer this past week, and I’m proud of myself for choosing not to let the running be that thing.

Before I get into the many big accomplishments in my running last week, I’ll start with tonight’s run. I’m really happy with myself for getting out tonight. The Cardinals had a Monday Night Football game but I still managed to sneak in a roughly 20-minute run between work and the game. I’ve entered into a really good phase of my running. I’m past the point where I need to find a guided run on the Nike app every time I go out. Tonight, I just decided I was going to start running in a direction and work my way around the block. No need, to have a voice in my earbuds reminding me of proper pacing and providing distractions for tough moments.

I did the same on Saturday, so I’m getting used to not having the Nike “coaches” talking me through runs. I’ll still keep using guided runs a lot, but it was nice to do a few that were just me working on my pacing and reminding myself to run strong without needing a voice to do it for me.

Before I go into the “Big Run” aka the one I’ve been building up to this entire time, let me mention a few other huge improvements in my running. Last week, I had a few runs where there was less pain in my right knee and left foot! That was huge. It tells me that either my body is adapting to running or I’m losing enough weight to make a difference. It was short-lived because my knee was throbbing during tonight’s run, but it does give me something to be optimistic about. I was really happy with all of my runs last week, even if I didn’t have the time or energy to write about them.

The big one was my Birthday Run. When I started doing this I was hoping to be back to 5k by my birthday and God damn it, I made it! I busted out a full 5k on my birthday. I later realized it had been 39 days since I started running again and I ran 5k on my 39th birthday. It was a really good run, except for the part where I really had to umm…well…there’s really no polite way to put this…SHIT…

R. James Miller

Mental health, emotional wellness, opinion, & travel-focused writer. Writing about my weight struggles, personal growth, and wanderlust.