The Background of my Backside

Like my brown eyes and penchant for Lifetime movies, I got my ass from my mother. Or, more accurately, from her Italian family. All the women in my mom's family have junk in their trunk and what I like to call birthing hips. My younger brother prefers the endearing term thunder thighs. I've read that we're actually fortunate, that we'd be way worse off if we stored the fat around our stomachs, which is more harmful to your heart. But this offers little consolation when I'm shopping for pants.

I grew up an active kid, playing all kinds of sports through my high school years. I continued with field hockey in college, which guaranteed a minimum of two hours of exercise every day in the fall, and a steady schedule of workouts throughout the rest of the year. This lifestyle allowed me to eat liberally, without much concern for weight gain (until I started binge drinking, but that's a subject for a different blog entirely). But now that I hit 25 and spend 9 hours a day in an office, I've found I can't be as liberal as I used to be. Or, rather, my increasingly tighter jeans and growing muffin top have let me know that I can't be as liberal as I used to be.

My solution: I will attempt to run my ass off.

I started running races after I graduated college so I would have a goal to work toward. My first half marathon was great, I finished in just over two hours. But I also trained a lot. I've subsequently run five distance races (ten milers and half marathons), but never with the same success as my first race. I just completed a half marathon on May 17 at the sloth's pace of 2 hours and 18 minutes. In the race photos my thighs look like two gigantor blobs in too-tight spandex pants jiggling along the course, nothing vaguely resembling runner's legs. I'm sure if I asked people who don't know me to guess--based soley on the size of my thighs--my finish time for 13.1 miles, they would pick something closer to 3 hours.

This August I will run either a half marathon or ten miler in Chicago. The race still to be determined, depending on the availability of my hosts in Chicago. Tomorrow I will begin my training for the August race, with the dual hope of getting back to the 2-hour pace and slimming down my haunches and big booty.