The Penguin Mind :: The Penguin Chronicles :: April 1995 Standing at the starting line–no, actually standing well away from the starting line, the nervous energy begins to build. I find myself trying to hide in the crowd, afraid that the race director will spot me and ask me to leave. “Hey you!” he calls out in my nightmare. “What are you doing here? This is a race for runners!” We penguins have different things on our mind at the beginning of races than you eagles and sparrows. In the front row, the talk is always the same. This is…

Forget stress. One of the best things about running is that it’s absolutely unnecessary. I don’t have to run. Very few of us do, really. It’s not like we’re chasing down our food. We don’t have to escape from predators. Heck, most of us don’t have to run to catch a bus. But we run. The question then becomes why? My own survey of thousands of runners has convinced me that the number one reason most people start to run is to lose weight. When the diameter of your waist is more than one-and-a-half times the length of your inseam…

It’s hard to believe that this is the 6th year of the 100 Days Challenge. For those of you who are new to the party here’s a brief history.  In January of 2010 I threw my back out. It was so bad that I ended up in two different emergency rooms trying to get some relief. Months went by and the pain, while lessened, never truly went away. I could walk, some, but couldn’t run at all. It was the first time in nearly 20 years of running that I had an injury that prevented me from running. Then, in…

2011 was quite a year. I’ve been a runner, or what I think of as a runner, for 20 years. I’ve run 45 marathons, I’ve done more half marathons and 5 and 10K’s than I can remember, I’ve done duathlons, triathlons, and even a couple of half Ironmans. But what I did in 2011 means more to me than all of that combined. In December of 2010, after the most frustrating athletic year of my life, I decided to move, intentionally, for 30 minutes a day for the first 100 days of 2011. I wasn’t concerned about what I did,…

There is an old saying; Failing to plan is planning to fail. Well, the author of that quote didn’t know much about people like me. I did plan. And I did plan to fail. Whether it was a fitness program, or weight loss, or quitting smoking, I had to fail. No matter how much planning or hoping or dreaming went on in advance, the end was always the same: failure. If I had succeeded, at any point, my life would have changed. I would have changed. The “ME” that I had spent years cultivating would be a different me. The…

Although keeping a training log is useful for many runners, sometimes the devil is in the details.   I was asked recently if I thought of myself as a runner who writes or a writer who runs. The question worried me. Anyone who has seen me run probably thinks I look like a writer. On the other hand, there may be those who think that I write like I run. The truth is, I don’t think of myself in either of those contexts, at least not in an exclusive way. I started writing about running the way most runners do:…

No one, especially me, wants to think about anything except the Holidays right now. I’m away visiting with family, I’ll take a few days to enjoy old hobbies and explore some new ones, and I absolutely want to enjoy every minute of the season. So, this is NOT a call to action. This is a call to celebration. I do want to take a minute to explain the 100 Days Challenge, to tell you what we’ve done, to tell you want we’re gonna do, and to tell what’s a little different for 2020. The 100 Days Challenge is pretty simple,…

Every new runner encounters a few bumps now and then-the key is to push on.  I got my first e-mail address in the mid 1980s when I was an administrator at the University of Illinois. At that time, sending e-mail was a novel concept. Since I knew only two other people who had e-mail, we quickly ran out of things to write to one another. At some point, though, e-mail went from novelty to necessity. It hit a tipping point, a concept that Malcolm Gladwell famously coined in one of my favorite books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can…