Last Wednesday, I was trudging up a hill barely able to breathe.

(In hindsight: probably all four.)

And her taste in music.

And I was wearing the wrong socks.

And my shins hurt.

I was reminded of our own Meghan Walberts experience as a beginning runner, which she chronicledhere.

She, too, had a disastrous first run, one that almost put her off from continuing.

But heres the thing: Ive been here before.

Ive run a bunch of half-marathons before, and even a full marathon once.

Spoiler: The problems all turned out to be fixable.

This applies to pretty much everything in fitness: youcanlift, youcanroller skate, youcando pushups every morning.

That doesnt mean youll do it perfectly on your first day, but there really is a path forward.

I can be one of them.

In short, you just have to replace the thought I cant with I can, but how?

and get to work on figuring it out.

But some have easier fixes than others, and some dont even need to be fixed right away.

Being able to breathe comfortably was, of course, at the top of my list.

Ill use it next time.

My allergies can also usually be controlled with an over-the-counter medication, I had just forgotten to take any.

I have a few different sports bras I can try on.

If none of them fit me well anymore, I might have to go shopping.

So another thing I did was to decide which problems can be put off until later.

I will shop forproper running sockslater.

But I dontneeda heart rate reading to do my next easy run.

I spent hours after my run troubleshooting my tech issues, and I still dont have a solution.

That question is easy to answer:Forget the watch, and just run.

(Thats the app I hated.

Sorry, Peloton.)

But heres the thing: My half marathon is six months in the future.

I havent run any serious distance in the last four years or so.

Get used to running again.Thatis my actual goal.

I sat down and sketched out a very rough outline of the next few months.

This week and next week, Im not running longer than 30 minutes at a time.

Ive written before about thepros and cons of Couch to 5K, a popular program among beginner runners.

One of its strengths is that it gets people sticking to a program right away.

One of its weaknesses is that not everybody wants or needs to stick rigidly to a program right away.

For me, it was my shins.

Calm down, catastrophe-brain.

You dont give yourself shin splints in a matter of minutes.

The first thing to remember is that feeling pain doesnt always mean youve damaged yourself.

Sometimes youre just feeling a new sensation and your body is like, wait, what the heck?

It came and went, and by the end I was able to mostly ignore it.

And the next most important thing is that resting doesnt solve problems by itself.

Aside from extreme injuries like stress fractures, runningthroughan injury is usually part of solving it.

is a great way to understand how to prevent and how to manage that particular injury.

First, I took my allergy medication.

(I considered using my inhaler, but ultimately did not need it.)

Then, I did a try-on session with my collection of sports bras.

I thought about going without my watch, but I ended up reinstalling the Strava app.

It can track time and distance, which is handy, even if I dont have heart rate.

I decided to do an easy run that day.

I like music for hard efforts and podcasts or audiobooks for easy days.

And you know what?

That run went great.

(Look, this is my idea of fun, OK?)

I felt so good that I almost added another lap at the end.

There will be other runs.