It's never too late to start running

As a child growing up in Ramallah, I never enjoyed running or ran much, other than short distances in games with other children, in physical education classes at school or fleeing soldiers during demonstrations. In 1986, I went running in Jerusalem with a friend who ran 45–50 minutes every day during his lunch hour. I was exhausted after 20 minutes and eventually took the bus back to the Arab Thought Forum, the nongovernmental organization in East Jerusalem for which we both worked at the time. That was the beginning and end of my running experience in my early twenties. It was not until 2013, a few months after I turned 50, that I took up running again.