Teaching others to run

Teaching others to run: This can pose a challenge, a fun one, but a challenge none the less. I have taken after my aunt in being a runner and having the stamina to keep going, however, my mom asked me this weekend to teach her to run. Now, for us runners, being asked to teach someone HOW to run seems a bit obscured… afterall, we have been doing it since we could walk, haven’t we? It seems to me that I never learned how to run, I just did it. I went for a run when I was in 7th grade after dinner and I haven’t stopped since. Now to teach my mom how to run, I knew this would be a funny task because there is no real method as to how to go about teaching it. Running is an instinct inside of us all. We all know how to run, all that can be taught is mechanics, form, pace, habits, etc. So that is what we did. Friday evening after I got home, my mom said for me to lace up my shoes so we could go for a jog, she wanted to learn how to run. I laughed at her and put my shoes on. As we went for a loop around the neighborhood I yelled at her to stop stopping to walk and to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth. She was out of breath from running four houses away. It seems to me that all that can be taught to her is how to be consistent. How to keep at it and to not stop when it starts to hurt. That is how we all got to where we are today… through hard work. Its not always about being coached by someone else, it is about what we can teach ourselves and having the guidance from someone else who knows what they are doing as well.