Good Decisions

I have successfully completed 15 weeks of training for the St. Louis marathon. During which, I have run 376 miles. By no means am I considered a "marathoner" as I barely finished 20 miles and still need to stop and walk, stretch and drink, but that is not my goal for this first marathon. I know now that if I were to run a half marathon, I would run it all with out stopping. I might even have enough energy to kick it in the last few minutes. I would probably run for time and not just "to finish". 7 weeks ago, that was not the case.

So, what this tells me is that if I were to stick to this, the next marathon I run will be for more than just the finisher’s metal. I will never run to compete with anyone other than myself but even that competition is healthy. I desperately craving another sort or fitness activity but will stick out my finally 3 weeks of training and then switch gears. I cannot complain about 29, 21, and get this 9 mile weeks I have coming up. It's going to a breeze and I plan to enjoy every minute of it. If I don't, please remind me.

I did not even get to running until after 5 last night. Every piece of me told me I was making a big mistake. My stomach was still bothering me, I was tired from a busy exciting weekend and I hadn't eaten in 6 hours. I was in the midst of a huge decision. One likely to weigh on my mind for awhile as I've proven a lot to myself in this process and will be looking back on these lessons for many other trials in life. Here were the choices I'd given myself:

• Do it get it over with and be happy knowing you completed your goal. If you can't finish, you know you tried. If you do finish, you'll feel that much better
• Skip it. Try to squeeze it in sometime this week, maybe on Good Friday and alter the rest of the schedule. You will feel bad if you try and fall short of the 20 miles. You had a busy weekend and should have planned better.
• Skip it completely. My training program was designed with an 18 and a 20 (which I already did 2 weeks ago) and some are only designed with an 18. You'll be fine without. Just go to bed.
  

I chose option number 1. It didn't end there however. I was faced through the whole race with many decisions, most of them pertaining to how far and how long I was actually going to run. The original plan was to run 16, stop by home and drop off the dog and then finish with a 4-mile loop. Somewhere around mile 10 I knew that I did not want to stop at home and then have to keep going. I was going to try to avoid that. Decision number 1: Should I stop at 16, still impressive but not within my threshold of mile to skip on a run? When I got to the home stretch, Casey was still hanging on pretty well. So I decided to extend the loop by 3 miles (so I was going to do more than 16 by this point. Good decision) If I quit after this, I would be leaving my total goal shy about 1 mile. Decision number 2: Should I call it at 19 miles? Only 1 mile short, well within my threshold. No one would have to know. Rounding up, I ran 20 miles, right? Two blocks from home, I added on another mile (approximately).

The running had certainly gotten to me and I’d gone crazy. That’s the only logically explanation. I have no idea where that energy came from. There was NO WAY I could make it another mile. I was having some issues with my nose (and the lack of Kleenex), the bathroom at the park closed 20 minutes before I got there (already 2 hours ago) and I was so thirsty I would have stopped to alleviate any of those problems with out a second thought. The only thing that kept me going was the disappointment I would have felt if I shorted myself even 1 mile. It’s hard to consider 16 or 19 miles anything but an accomplishment but when you had 20 in mind; it’s just shy of the perfect feeling of success.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; 90% of this is a mental game. With the race so close, I don’t have time to get discouraged or to look at what I’ve done as anything less than I could have, should have or would have done under different circumstance. I may not have stuck to the plan to a T and I did miss some runs. I even shorted myself on miles on several occasions BUT I ran 20 miles last night and in 19 days, I’ll run 26.2.