Who I am

Or at least who I think I am… because who knows…

In broad terms, I’m a forty something man until I’ll get a half century in 2019, sports lover in general and running particularly.

I started running when I was at school, as almost everybody. Later on, when I was at the university, I was practicing Karate and it wasn’t until last year when I returned to run. The thing was due that in December that year, I had a hernia operation, so I left Karate for a few months, with the subsequent weight acquisition. Three months later, I started swimming and in summer, I went back to run. Besides, I had given up smoking (some years later, I would fuck up again) and I began to be so wonderfully.

The thing did not last long. Barely a year and a half. Later on I would marry and that new and comfortable life led to supine inactivity and smoking again, although this was rather due to the projects I was involved at that time, in which I spent whole nights making sure that t he banking applications do what they were supposed to do.

Time passed. I had children and one day a friend remarked to me that if I continued like that, I could soon attend to the Empire Strikes Back in the role of Java the Hutt.

_ So bad I am?

_ I don’t know, you’ll see. Being fat and smoking at every time, you have every chance that one fine day you pop your heart.

So “one fine day” I jumped to run again. I barely held 10 minutes and reached home almost throwing up the lights. But next day, with laces up in the ears, I jumped running again. And so next day, and next, and next. And so I did for months. I started to loose weight and to stand more time running. I left 16 Kg in the road, and in only four months! I have to say that I also changed my diet, giving up to eat pizzas and beers at dinner time, and starting with salads and water, and maybe some day a non-alcoholic beer. That was in 2007.

I continued like this for the rest of the year. And so next one. And thus, late summer of 2008 I quit smoking and so I continue to date. And I ran. On one trip we made to New York in 2008, I did not hesitate to take the sportswear to run through Central Park one day. That year my cousin María told me that if we ran the San Silvestre together as her husband Ramiro had backed down after having caught the dorsal. And so we did it. I think that we spent more than an hour in those 10 Km, but it was the same. We only run for pleasure, without thinking in good times and nothing like.

Some months later I discovered that there was not only the San Silvestre race, by a wide range of popular races and hence, I ended up enrolling in Liberty Seguros race, first of more than twenty races I have run so far. Well… second one, as the first one was San Silvestre race.

And so I continued discovering this "running" world, heart rate monitors, running shoes and specialized magazines, and… injuries. The inevitable? injuries that follow us relentless to all of us, or almost all of the runners and sportsmen in general, and against which I fight with more determination than anything else, trying to minimize them in order to avoid new breaks for months that come to remind me that time passes and gradually taking its toll on my body, that despite being in perfect shape, it is still almost twice as old of that guy’s who one day was first launched on the run when had not yet shaken off the shell.