How has your running changed in the past decade?

Wow.  I can barely believe that 2009 is pretty much over. What’s even freakier is that 10 years have passed since that whole Y2K thing!  10 years!  A decade.  In the blink of an eye.

Or it feels like the blink of an eye – at least until I actually stop and think back over that 10 years and all that’s happened.  While my life has changed dramatically in 10 years (I think I would be more concerned if it hadn’t!), one of the most relevant and notable developments is that this is the decade in which I became a runner.  Of course telling it later I will need to be more specific – saying “I took up running in the early two-thousands” doesn’t sound natural, “the early uh-ohs” sounds dumb, early this millennium is just melodramatic – so I will likely go with “I took up running in the summer of ’04.”

I didn’t consider myself a runner in 2004.  In fact, I wasn’t completely sure it would stick, given that I took several months off due to my very valid reasons (read: lame excuses!) of not having a treadmill or a reflective jacket.  Fortunately the break was enough that when I resumed running it stuck.  I don’t really remember when I started calling myself a runner.  It wasn’t one of those epiphanies that I tend to have (yeah, so I am melodramatic after all.  But what the heck? It pairs well with my tendency to be sentimental).  I was just running and therefore was a runner.

How about you?  What has changed about your running in the past year?  The past decade?