The One You’ve Been Waiting For. Or at least that I have been waiting to write.

It is official: I am insane.  

This is probably a commitment that I am going to regret by July.  By August, I am going to want to give up.   September will bring with it exhaustion nearing death.  October will be the month from hell.  And when November 22 rolls around, I will just pray that the last 8 months have paid off.  What is it that is happening on November 22 you ask?  I’ll tell you.

On November 22, I am going to run the Philadelphia Marathon.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  Yes, I am crazy for wanting to run 26.2 consecutive miles.  Yes, I am crazy for wanting to do it without stopping.  And yes, I assure you, I am a nutcase for wanting to do well.  Anyone who has ever trained for something of this magnitude*–or even half this magnitude–will agree with me when I say that the actual event isn’t the hard part.  It is the training.  You know, running upwards of 80 miles per week in the middle of the summer.  Getting up 2 hours earlier than usual so I can run before my job and the summer heat which makes it nearly impossible.  Probably the most difficult thing?  Staying motivated.

Motivation is a funny thing.  I have been running the last week or so to get back in shape.  The first time I ran was last Friday (3/27) which gave me a whole lot of motivation.  Why?  I’ll tell you.

After I got out of work at 5:30 I was all, “Its like 60°, I should totally go for a nice run to finish off the day.”  Then I was all, “I haven’t run in a while, so I will just go for 15 minutes and turn around” which would have been about 3.5 miles for me.  ”What a good plan!” I thought.  So I got changed, stretched myself out and was on my way.  The first block was awesome.  Hell, the first mile was awesome.  I got tired pretty quickly, but that was to be expected having not run for like 6 weeks.  Everything was going well.  I was 15 minutes in, just about to head home…and then it happened.

You see, I am used to rational, straight-forward, thinking people.  I am one of these people.  Usually.  The way that we think is this: I am going to make a city;  I should lay out the roads in a grid so that if someone gets lost, they can find their way to where they are supposed to go.  Apparently our founding fathers did not think this way, because as I tried to turn around, I got hopelessly lost.  Suburban Philadelphia is a maze of cul-de-sacs, roads that navigate in giant circles and completely irrational back tracks.  This created a problem for me.

The result?  Instead of running my nice 25 minute run, I ended up running for 55 minutes.  Cold.  With 6 weeks of nothing but sitting around, drinking beer and eating pizza under my belt.  Awesome.  Needless to say, I was kinda pissed at myself.  And, the next 3 days, very, very sore.

At the same time, though, I was extremely excited.  If I could do this–run almost an hour–with 6 weeks of lazy sedentary life under my belt, what could I actually do if I trained?  Run a marathon perhaps?  And, given that I have almost 8 months to train, and I can already run 1/5 of the way, how well can I train myself to run this marathon?  Running 26.2 miles has been a goal that I knew I would have to achieve since I started running almost 4 years ago, and this year I am finally going to do it.  

And I couldn’t be more excited!

 

*Also, I am going to do the Philadelphia ING half-marathon in September.  Awesome.

~ by sisypheanfeat on 4 April, 2009.