Running Update

So I am not going to post anything about how well my morning runs are going because I don’t want to jinx it. I’ve been doing a lot of poking around the runnersworld forum and found a lady with a similar problem I have going forward towards the marathon, in that she is also running the paris marathon and got sick for two and a half weeks recently and is now facing her first marathon with truncated training. The replies are varied and interesting, ranging from “go ahead and alter your training plan, if its your first one and you have no time goal than it won’t be a problem” to “why would you run any marathon unless you were hitting all the training one hundred percent all the time”.

This of course led to forum topics about the widely controversial issue of the secularization of marathons – anybody can do it if they train, and often even if they don’t train very well, and many “serious” runners are quite upset about this. The “serious” runners’ viewpoint is that if you can’t qualify for Boston, you aren’t running fast enough, and therefore aren’t even running the race, simply finishing it.

The truth is, most people like that truly are simply just trying to finish it. Me, for example. Many of these more … committed? Experienced? Devoted?... runners are upset that people like me will be able to label themselves in the same group even though I have yet to run a sub-eight minute mile. And I totally understand. I was counting on some pretty committed training and regular hellish workouts when I decided to run a marathon, and somehow that just didn’t happen, I blame my singularity. I feel I am totally open to finding a group to train with and really trying to freakin RUN a marathon…. In a year or so. For now I am perfectly content to re-vamp my schedule and try to finish.

So on the revamping, I have decided that the focus for this week is CONSISTENCY, which is something I should have focused on a long time ago – and maybe I did focus on it but failed. I went to bed last night with a thought I don’t remember ever having before, which was “if you stay up watching this show, you will be waking up tired tomorrow”. It is the putting my finger on the sacrifice that I have not connecting specifically to running before. I mean, in high school my relationship with working out was twisted, and in college it was taken for granted that I would be tired all the time. But in the past two years I have really come to understand how important sleep is to my body, and to my personality, and sacrificing SLEEP, precious recovery time, has proved impossible. If I have been tired at all, I will sleep in. But not today. Today I sacrificed. Thank god.

So this week I am ramping up my mileage to focus on consistency, and this weekend I will attempt a long run. Next week I will switch gears and go on fewer but longer runs, as the newbie training plans recommend. This will happen for the remaining weeks, and I hope to run a 15 on the 13th/14th, and back down to a 11/12 on the 20/21st, with a goal to peak up around an 18/20 mile run on the 28th as a practice run – same time, same clothes, same food. I believe this is reasonable, as that little gear in my head has FINALLY clicked and I find the commitment I have been searching for. It is this click that I have been waiting to hear for the past SIX MONTHS that I was relying upon. Oops…!

I am remaining consistent with strength training, working in some more yoga, and taking a ten minute walk break at lunch which helps break up the day (otherwise, I am sitting in my desk for LITERALLY 8 hours but for a 30 foot walk to the kitchen or bathroom).

So much for not blogging about my specific running plans….