My coworker Mike put together a team to do Seattle’s annual Big Climb event (this year it’s on March 22), and I am one of his easily winded participants (go Team Flabalanche!). What is the Big Climb? Well, every year the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society organizes a race to raise money for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma research. The race consists of climbing 69 flights of stairs up the Columbia Center in downtown Seattle. That’s right, your favorite mediocre athlete is going to try and run up 69 flights of stairs. Me, aka the person incapable of running along a...

I don’t know what it is about my running speed, but I’m either too slow or too fast to run with a buddy or in a group. It’s like I give off some sort of anti-social pheromone (it’s probably sweat, which I do a lot) whereby people catch a whiff of it and are motivated to run a couple hundred yards ahead of me. Case in point: my recent track workout. I showed up for my first track night in like a month, but the pattern was eerily familiar. We all do some warm up laps and some drills before Teresa tells us what the workout is and assigns a pace for each of us. Every single time she...

On Sunday I dragged my sedentary ass outside and shuffled around Capitol Hill for four measly miles. The following is a transcript of the conversation I had with my body. Enjoy. Me: Hey body, get up. Body: What? Why? What for? Me: We’re going for a run. Body: Ehhhhhh, I don’t wanna. I want to sit on the couch and watch House Hunters while eating Reese’s pieces. Me: Come on, we haven’t gone on a run in weeks, and we haven’t had consistent workouts since October. Body: Meh. Me: You’re looking a little flabby lately… Body: Isn’t big supposed to be...