Melissah Burt

Of my handful of amazing, life-altering new year resolutions, the most ridiculous one was probably the decision to start running. I don’t mean that in a figurative, fearful, avoidant kind of way, but quite literally. As in, like, three times a week I put on running shoes and actually leave my house with the intention of moving in one direction at a rather fast pace only to turn around and walk back. I return home damp and puffed and hungry and hating myself, and even taking off my shoes is an effort. Jogging (if you can even call my clumsy, lumbering gait a job) is the most difficult, most exhausting, most amazing thing I have ever done. I want to marry the road.

Do you want to run? You should check out the Couch to 5K running program which promises without so much as a blink of an eye that you will be running 5K in 9 weeks, you lazy couch potato, by getting you out and about three times a week. It does this through interval training (which, according to my fitness instructor sister, Sharyn, is the best kind of training), starting with alternating 30 seconds of jogging with 90 seconds of walking, and getting worse and worse until the very last day when you are set lose to jog five damn kilometers. I jog with my Dad and Chelsea. Chelsea isn’t much of a conversationalist and Dad damaged his Achilles tendon back when he was soldiering around and thinks he won’t be able to sustain a long run. He also anticipates that I will overtake him, which is laughable. Every girl knows her daddy is a superhero.

Exercise is one of those weird things that seems more difficult when you’re thinking about it than when you’re doing it. Writing is the same, you know. If I could count the amount of times I’ve agonised over a story that, when it came down to the crunch, was somewhere in the realm of stealing candy from the proverbial baby, I’d probably be more interested in mathematics, not literature. Seriously, who wants to count that high? And anyway, if you stop thinking about it and just do it, you just do it, because your body knows exactly what’s going on. At the risk of delving into the realm of melodrama, you body craves the tap of fingers against a keyboard the same way it is lulled by the thud of feet against the ground. I like to think that these sounds emulate the beating of your mother’s heart and awaken the primordial, zygote-y part of you. She wraps her umbilical cord around your spine, separating your icky, thinky neurons from that part of your brain what don’t think or whatever: the part that types and types and types like a biological perpetual motion machine destined to forever transcribe your thoughts via this intrusive third party, this weird mutant youbabything that has tangled itself up in your spinal column.

Look, don’t ask me to explain what that means. Maybe what I’m saying is that the hardest part of running is the period before you do it, and maybe writing is that like that, too. Maybe you’ve just got to download the app off iTunes and type.

And you should probably get that mutant baby think checked out.