This post is about reading, I promise. Just bear with me for a moment first.

I have two prosthetic heart valves. Or rather, I have a cluster of heart defects, of which the prosthetic heart valves are the most striking and easiest to explain. This rarely impinges on my life in any significant way, but it does affect my ability to run. I've been thinking about this recently, because I've started jogging. This is something I've done off-and-on ever since I was a teenager, and I've developed some hitherto-unspoken personal rules:

1. I never jog with a group.
I'm too hyper-aware of my limitations. I may have actually first become vividly aware of the disparity between my experience and most people's in 11th grade, when my AP English teacher wrote a sentence example in which she confessed "While some people can run 10 or 15 miles, I get out of breath after a measly two-mile jog." I remember thinking "Whoa, hang on. Two miles is measly?"

The summer after that, I went to a summer arts camp (OK, strictly speaking I was in the jazz band, so make all relevant jokes here). I ran a mile and a half every morning with my almost literally indefatigable friend Kyle (who was on the track team at his school) and several slower people. I was by far the slowest, but I could run most of it, and I felt great the rest of the day. That camp was a "safe space" in pretty much every sense, such as I haven't experienced since, and it was, not coincidentally, the only time in my life I've run in a group. Today, I don't have any desire to set off with a group of people who  and I know that other people will find it hard to understand that motivational exhortations will have no affect when I just can't draw the air I need to get up that next hill. 

The only person I run with is my wife, and even with her, the knowledge that she may accidentally set an unattainable standard just by running a normal distance at a normal pace stresses me out a bit. 

When it comes to pickup sports, it's a little different - I can normally hide my deficient running, and I am frequently (and contentedly) the least skilled person who's actually willing to join in. I'm all right with that - it's the stark, unforgiving linearity of running in a group and getting left behind that bothers me.  

2. I don't set myself any target beyond "to the streetlight at the end of this block"
My jogging mantra is "whatever I'm doing right now is better than doing nothing", so I always set myself an extremely modest goal, give myself permission not to meet it, and then incrementally ratchet it up if I feel OK having achieved it. I sometimes use a distance-tracking app on my phone, but I've made sure never to let it develop expectations based on my past performance. The idea of having a standard to hit and exceed alarms me. 

3. I don't really want to get better at running
What I mean by this is that being able to run for longer stretches at a time seems like a terrible prize for improving my fitness. Seriously, why would I want to spend more of my time doing this? This also applies to the running adage that "the first mile is the worst". I've noticed that I often feel more able to run at the end of a run than I did at the beginning, but the last thing I want to do, having just done my time, is to keep going! 

So here's why I'm writing about running: I'm certain that everything I've just written about running applies to reading for some of my students, and this is raising big questions for me about how I should be supporting them.