Time to run!

Okay, so my delve into the healthy vegetarian food world hasn't worked out as well as planned.  Interestingly, one big reason was all of the packaging involved with no way to return it for reuse.  Anyway, enough about that.  Today is a new road.  I've figured out that for me to succeed I need to do something I truly enjoy.  Not sure why, but it seems everything I really enjoy, or want to try and enjoy, is not shared by others.  Flying solo is always more difficult.  So, what do I love.  I love to run.  Basic background is I used to love running when I was a kid.  Then other things came and went, but bottom line was running wasn't cool so went by the wayside.  Fast forward to 1980's, I was out of shape and smoking.  I decided to  quit by buying a bicycle using the money I would spend on cigarettes (my mind is so easy to play games with).  Long story short, I met Bill, a fellow graduate student who was as crazy as I was (almost) and we decided we should do triathlons.  With Bills help I learned how to swim and I was already riding my bike, so running wasn't too bad.  Now, let me mention that I am a big guy.  General consensus is guys over 180 are too big to run.  At my best "fighting" weight I was 196.  Long story short, I loved it!  When I left grad school I lost my swimming pool so transitioned to marathons and did a couple of them before having my lungs blasted with formaldehyde.  My last marathon was in 1991 and by 1994 I was not able to climb a flight of stairs without stopping to catch my breath.  In 2006 I went on disability and started the long road back.  I ran the Freedoms Run marathon in 2011, very slowly and painfully.  I really thought my running days were over. So, back to the present.  I am trying to run again.  I miss my running and refuse to concede that it is in my past.  I am only 67, so I believe there are many good years ahead.  I've been working out at the gym and doing yoga, but these are not the same.  My running has always been my meditation, my path to sanity in what I see as a crazy world.  So here's the plan.....barefoot running.  The scar tissue in my lungs will always limit my capability, so I must run efficiently.  As fate would have it, I won a pair of Xero running sandals a while back so I tried using them with what I believe to be a loose interpretation of barefoot running and went out yesterday in 93 degree heat and ran (off and on to feel my feet) one mile.  It felt great, and I found I was using far less energy, thus needed far less air.  So I've signed up for a Chi Running clinic on October 1st to get real training.  We will see how the saga plays out!