The reason I don't run

Not that I need a reason not to run. Running is completely unfun, it is bad for your joints, it causes you to sweat profusely and it makes you tired, and from what I can tell it does not give me endorphins but merely exhausts and depresses me. But I also have a reason not to run that carries over from my childhood.

This one time in second grade I was running somewhere on the playground and I fell over very painfully and scraped my hands where I was using them to try to protect my face, and I also failed to protect my face because I fell so hard and I banged my cheek and had a cut there as well. I was only seven so I went crying to my teacher (not the nice second-grade teacher but the nasty one, although on this occasion she gave me sound advice), and she said, "Your head was running too fast for your body." Which didn't make any sense, since my head cannot run at all, and I asked for clarification, and she said, "You were leading with your head. The top of you went too fast for the bottom of you."

I then got an image of my running self as something like this: / So that if the slightest bit of forward tilt happened I would go right over, being inclined while running to tilt forward anyway.
Thereafter I adopted a new running system, which was to lean my head really far back in order to prevent it from speeding ahead of my legs, as I knew it would be much more difficult, while running forward, to tip myself over backward, and thus I would protect myself from injury. I did that for several years.

Then someone said I ran funny, and I realized they were quite correct, that most people simply found a way to convince their heads to run at the same speed as their bodies, resolving the forward tilt problem by demanding obedience from their heads. I, being unsure that I would be capable of getting my head to obey (after the catastrophic and really painful falling-down incident that my head should really have been clever enough to avoid), decided to just stop running, insofar as that would be possible.

And here I am, a happy and well-adjusted person who doesn't run. You don't have to run to be happy. Many happy people never run at all. I run to catch buses or trains, or to catch people before they go somewhere in order to give them something they have forgotten and left behind; but I do not run recreationally, because running is just not fun. It just isn't. It is a recipe for disaster. And I have never been able to break the habit of trying to make myself do like this when I run: \ If you see me running, I am probably leaning backwards to stop my head from outrunning my body - which seems silly except that I am protecting myself from serious injury.