The overweight person is faced with three choices: (1) be fat; (2) be hungry; (3) exercise. The first choice is unacceptable to many: Most people would rather be lean and trim. By middle age, more than 50 percent of Americcans are overweight and hat it. They have doubled their risk of heart disease, tripled their chance of having gallstones, and quadrupled their incidence of diabetes.

The second choice - dieting - is ineffective. Nevertheless, despite the 20-to-1 odds against permanent success, one out of every four adults in the United States is dieting to lose weight. These peole have accepted an alternative to being fat: being hungry. In order to maintain weight loss, they have to eat less and less. They must resign themselves to an unceasing craving for food. They are engaged in a never-ending battle against lard.

It is a war they can never win. With dieting, the initial weight lost is due to water lost, then muscle, then fat. Losing muscle results in lowering the metabolism and, therefore, in a need for fewer and fewer calories. Eventually, the diet that caused weight loss no longer work. The fat returns, so 95 percent of all dieters return to their original weight. What’s more, they have lessmuscle, less energy, and more fat than they started out with.

Fortunately, the third alternative does work. Exercise is the rational, scientific, and successful way to lose weight. I know one group of exercise intimately: runners. My medical coleagues who treat the sedentary overweight have been studying the defeated. I have found it much more instructive to study the winners. It is a rare runner who is overweight or, even more important, overfat.

Contrast the dismal sequence of weight lost and weght regained in dieters against what occurs in runners. Runners lose weight, sometimes in enormous amounts. But they also replace fat with muscle. Conseequently, their metabolism speeds up rather than slows down as in dieters. A runner burns as many as 500 extra calories a day. As the weight drops, the runner cacn eat more, not less. A new body weight is established based on the weekly mileage.

Exercise affords other important metabolic benefits. The blood lipid profile approaches the ideal: Total cholesterol and triglycerides go down, high-density lipoproteins (HDLs) go up, glucose tolerance improves, insulin levels decrease, blood pressure drops- all reducing the threat to your heart health.

These physical and physiological consequences of running, and indeed of any aerobic exercise program, make exercise the only rational and scientific choice for overweight people. But there are other benefits as well - benefits that mek it easier to keep weight control: the mental and emotional benefits conferred on people who use their body with intensity. Runners tell of the positive influence on mental health and creative processes. They speak of the self-esteem and self-confidence they develop out on the roads.

I tell you all this, and you may remain unmotivated to try exercise to handle you weight problem. perhaps this fact may help you decide: Runners can eat anything they want. Runners look on food as they friend. Dieters look on food as the enemy.

While dieters are engaged in hand-tohand combat with food, runners are on a high - eating to their heart’s content. While dieters fast, runners load.While dieters count calories, runners can’t get enough.

/George Sheenan on Running to Win

It was a long weekend and full of running for me. It was my longest running ever done after i made up my mind to take this new ‘religion’ seriously. Well, obviously, i’m preparing for my first marathon in Baguio this coming November 4, however, i found something different here. Running is not just running (please, don’t say that i’m jogging, i do run slow but i’m not jogging).

"Running maketh the whole man" says Francis Bacon.

Thursday, October 11 = Taal lake, Talisay - Olivares (Uphill running) : 1′22”

Friday, October 12 = Taal lake, Talisay - Olivares (Uphill running) : 1′21”

Sunday, October 14 = AIIAS, Silang (1 big round running) - 7eleven, Olivares - People’s Park, Tagaytay : 1′53” w/o stopping or 2′43” w/ stopping.

Special thanks for my coach, a real runner from Dagupan City, Pare Angelo… You’re not teaching me how to be a real runner but how to live a life… Thanks man!

I see you in Baguio, Milo 21K Marathon…

To the inexperienced eye, the jogger and the runner look much the same. And even people who’ve been runners for years may be hard pressed to tell the two apart. But in fact, there’s a world of difference between the jogger and the runner.

With the current sensitivity to being politically correct, what you call people has become very important. Each age and sex and ethnic group has a favored designation; any other terms may be regarded as pejorative and insulting. So there can be some hesitancy, when faced with someone in running shoes (if you are still calling them "sneakers," you are in real trouble, in choosing his or her correct label.

At one point, I used to define a runner as "a jogger who entered a race." To me, the essential difference between a jogger and a runner was not ability or training; it was an entry blank. After all, I know joggers who train longer and can run faster than runners who compete. It is the attitude, the perception of self, the need for a different expression that leads the jogger to fill out that first entry blank and take the giant step into competition.

Now I’m not so sure about that definition. The jogger who goes into races becomes a competitor, not a runner. The jogger has merely become a racer, a change that may be more sidewise than forward in progressing toward the goal of becoming a runner.

The jogger and the racer are in many ways quite alike. If the jogger is the runner in embryo, so is the racer. If the jogger is a novice, it is also true of the racer.

For each, the growth is first in ability. For the jogger, the yards becomes miles, the minutes become hours, the days become weeks. The dedicated pursuit of fitness occupies his mind and will. Jogging is the perfecting of the body. It ends there.

Some see the jogger as an automaton. In their ground breaking book Type A Behavior and Your Heart, Ray Rosenman and Myere Friedman state, "Jogging is a from of exercise in which man transforms himself into a machine, chug-chug-chuging along, looking neither right nor left."

William zinsser of the New York Times described joggers as "self-contained prisoners of fitness." He could see, he said, no joy on their faces, only duty and pain.

And it is true, of course, that the jogger is looking for results. Joggers expect to firm the body, lose weight, develop their legs, improve their wind. They want to get back into shape. It is also true that it is not easy, particularly at first. The muscles protest. Fatigue becomes manifest. Jogging is a chore and frequently a depressing one. In much of the same way, the student of Zen finds the mediation position at first impossible. Eventually, of course, it becomes quite natural - in fact, the preferred attitude.

Eventually, the jogger finds his nice slow pace, that comfortable level, settles into it, and relaxes. At that point, the jogger becomes content. There is no need to go farther. Good things are happening to his body. There is a perceptible difference in energy, in the waistline, in the response to tension and aggravation.

The jogger has found the way to accomplish the most in the least amount of time, the fills that quota day after day. Here at last is the way to dissipate stress, the method of handling a zero sum society where someone always wins and, therefore, others always have to lose. The jogger has discovered that the fittest do survive and has found a way to that fitness.

But if the jogger is goal oriented, so is the racer. The jogger has in mind correcting the physical effects of the sedentary life. The racer, on the other hand, is interested in remedying the psychological effects of that life: the boredom, the lack of self-esteem, the apathy, the depression, the loss of interest. Only later will they both see that the runner, without directly willing or seeking it, fills in the defects of his spiritual life.

Most people begin as joggers, then become racers, and finally grow to the status of runner. It seems to me that this is the normal progression, although others may go from being joggers to runners without ever entering a race.

/George Sheehan on Running to Win

Racing is the lovemaking of the runner. It is excitement in the blood. There is the same agitation, the same stirring of the pulse, the same feeling in the chest, the same delightful apprehension that you feel when nearing the one you love.

But there is also an element of fear. If racing attracts, it also repels. As I try for my perfection, I am all too aware of my imperfections. When I race, I am the person the philosopher William James called the "twice-born." Such people see an element of real wrong in the world, especially in themselves. And they know this must be overcome by doing something heroic, that they themselves must be cleansed by suffering.

I accept that. I still seek the race, seek to be tested, ask to meet pain and to pass or fail. The difference now is that the race has become simply a race. I continue to race, and I never give less than my best. At the finish, I am on my hands and knees, gasping and thinking, "This is absurd." But i have put aside the winning and the losing, the getting of trophies and not getting trophies. I have had my fill of that. I have become a runner.

Jogging, they say, is competing against yourself. Racing is competing against others. Running is discovering that competing is only competing. It is essential and not essential. It is important and unimportant. Running is finally seeing everything in perspective. Running is discovering the wholeness, the unity that everyone seeks. Running is the fusion of body, mind, and soul in that beautiful relaxation that joggers and races find so difficult to achieve.

Relaxation is the sign of the runner, not the racer or jogger. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to relax. i learned to relax not only my body but my mind and soul as well. I discovered that running is an art from and that I could be the running as the dancer is the dance. I found that running is play - and even more, a sort of spiritual discipline. It is a way of seeing reality, or perceiving the good and the true. Running gibes me my special perspective.

"Each of us has a mission of truth," writes the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassset. "What my eye sees of reality is seen by no other eye. We are irreplaceable; we are necessary."

When I run, truly run, I am certain of that. It is all there. My body does what it does best. The mind like a kaleidoscope constantly rearranges the things it has stored into new and exciting patterns. And my soul utterly loses itself in the present.

The runner has  a view of life that makes all the jogging and racing worthwhile.

/George Sheehan on Running to Win