get moving

I'm not giving anything away by letting on that the heroine in my latest book - RESCUING THE ROYAL RUNAWAY BRIDE - is a runaway bride ;). She literally jumps out of a ground floor window of a castle and runs across hill and dale in a pretty huge pink wedding dress in order to avoid marrying...well, a gorgeous prince, actually.  (But that's another story...)

I’ve never been a runner.  Or a jumper.  I have bad knees.  And low willpower when it comes to purposely inflicting discomfort upon myself. So apart from a strange aberration at the age of 10, I’ve never been a runner.  A lap swimmer.  Or a bicycler. Cyclist?  See I don’t’ even know the terminology.

The reason for my bad knees is years of dancing when I was a kid.  Because I looooove to dance.  In a club.  At a wedding.  Or in my kitchen with Bruno Mars slipping me some Uptown Funk.

I did Physical Culture (now Physie) for fifteen odd years.  I took Highland Dancing classes for three.  I was a gymnast (avoiding vault with everything I had, for its nothing but running and jumping and therefore the ultimate evil).

"Go Team Go!"

One of my first jobs was as a professional cheerleader. There was some jumping involved but the dance portion, and the pure fun, made up for it.  My team won a lot which helped.  And we got to travel – all the way to the USA one year.  So I coped.

Funnily, I never tried ballet until a couple of years ago - ballet slippers, legwarmers, the lot!  The flexibility and strength required, even from that first lesson, was mind-boggling.  It was truly hard. But those years of dance training as a kid stick so picking up the routines was doable.  And immensely satisfying.  My muscles thanked me for putting them through the wringer, even as they wept.

It's all about the outfit.

My favourite part of dancing was always the part where you stretch at the beginning and the end.  (The least runny/jumpy parts 😊.)

Imagine my state of pure bliss the first time I tried yoga.  Yoga is now my thing.  My bliss.  My time out.  My mental break.  No running.  No jumping.  Just lots of gorgeous stretching and stretching and more stretching. And then you get to lie down at the end for a really long time!

Yoga is the kind of purposeful infliction of discomfort I understand.  Not huffing and puffing and getting lactic acid itches in your legs and stitches in your side.  The kind where you feel your spine unfolding and your muscles sighing.  Where afterwards you feel an inch taller, and like you’re floating just a little off the ground.  Where you can feel oodles of sanctimony for having moved your body while at the same time sending “your positive energy out to your love ones and the whole world”!

Run as far and fast as you like, kids, no track coach will ever give you that 😉.

How about you?  What’s your favourite way to get moving? Do you love exercise or believe its the work of the devil?

(For those who are concerned about the fate of the gorgeous prince left at the altar by the runaway bride in RESCUING THE RUNAWAY BRIDE, do not fret!  He gets his own happy ever after in AMBER AND THE ROGUE PRINCE.)