They talked me into it: How Jana and Jana turned me into a runner
The 33rd annual Vancouver Sun Run — set for Sunday, April 23 — has inspired people of all ages and skills to lace up for SportMedBC’s InTraining clinics around the province, including Glen Schaefer, who filed this recent report, which has been edited for length:
Heading into tonight’s learnto-run clinic will mark another milestone — 30 minutes of continuous running. We’ll start out running for 10 minutes, walk for a minute, then run for 20 minutes, another minute-long walk, and finally 30 minutes of running.
All told, an hour of running, with a couple of minutes of walking in there somewhere. If you told me in January that I’d be doing this, I wouldn’t have believed it.
It kind of crept up on me, as I shuffled along and chatted every week with the ladies in my clinic. That’s another thing — my clinic at North Van’s Parkgate rec centre morphed last week into a women-only thing, with me the lone male exception.
The smaller run-faster group, for experienced runners looking to raise their game, is split between men and women, as is the powerwalking group.
But the folks in the middle have become the estrogen crowd. They make me feel right at home, though, especially clinic leaders Jana and Jana.
The Janas are easy to tell apart. Jana, who pronounces the first letter of her name like the “J” in joke, is the chattier one. She’s also shorter than Jana, who pronounces the first letter of her name like the “Y” in yolk, and who has a slight European accent whose specific origin I’ve been trying to guess at.
Conversation with them and the rest of the crew is what keeps me from noticing that the steadily-lengthening clinic runs are, in fact, getting steadily longer.
Last week’s was a sequence of runs — 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, then another 10 to finish off — during which the conversation covered this year’s great ski season, upcoming spring travel plans, and random family stuff.
The two runs a week that I do on my own, according to the Sun Run schedule, are meant to be shorter recovery runs to get me from clinic to clinic. Conversation is not needed during those runs, because I’m just relieved that they’re shorter than the clinic runs.
My compliments to the people who put together this formula.
You’re talking me into becoming a runner in spite of myself.