A runner?

A slight digression from the adoption blog...

"My wife is the runner!"  I don't know how many times I've said this since we've been married... Mary was a high school cross country and track champion, ran some in college, and then after college ran two marathons which I proudly watched from the sidelines.  Whenever anyone who knew us asked, "Do you think you will get inspired by her?" or "Do you run also?",  I shrugged it off, after all, why would I want to do that?  Especially if you get to see how someone feels the day after a marathon, it's not quite as inspiring as the image at the finish line!

Mary made a number of attempts to get me started running and I even tried a few times, always struggling to do a mile or two before wearing myself out.  Running was just no fun for me.  After managing to get up to the two mile ability without walking, a coworker of mine said we should sign up for a 5K.  He was not a runner as well and it seemed like a fun challenge.  So in March 2009, I ran my first race unless you count the one mile gym horror fests they made you do once a year in grade school.  It was exciting and I felt I might die at the finish line with my not so impressive 28 minute finish.  And then... I went back to my non-running ways.

A couple of months went by and I realized the only way to stay motivated for someone like me is to have some end goal in sight.. so I asked Mary if she would run a 10K with me.  She agreed and we registered for the Marine Corp Marathon 10K, a great race in downtown DC.  I struggled through that race in October 2009, even after a few months of training including running the race distance itself many times outside and on the treadmill and managed to finish at just under a nine minute pace.  With that race under my belt, our life got into a busy stage including minor items like committing to adopt!  Between this and spending any spare time at the gym preparing for our hiking in Kauai (that 22 mile adventure was a beast!), I certainly had forgotten about this excursion into my wife's running world.

However... when we got back, something about that adventure had lit a fire.  By the end of that month and with no memory now of what had placed the idea in my head, I had done a small amount of online research, chosen Hal Higdon's famous (and endorsed by Mary of course) beginner's training program (actually Novice Supreme, for us supreme novices with no running base built up) and registered for the National Marathon.  After all, I didn't want to over commit and plan travel to a different city or anything, who knows if I would even be there on race day?

I probably thought to myself I might tell a few people, raise money for something, or otherwise make a big deal of it (after all, isn't that what marathoners do?)... but it was pretty early on given the Marathon would be the next Spring, plus, shouldn't I wait to see if I followed through on at least some of the training before getting to many folks involved?

Many events transpired in the fall, some involving massive amounts of water (some of it the good kind.. hah), and this first level of training was done with many miles starting at the hotel our insurance placed us in for a few months.  We were both a bit distracted by various aspects of life, but it was nice to be doing some running and the weather was good for it.  As the weather got colder, many of my runs moved to the treadmill and I became maybe one of the most ridiculous cold weather wimps when it came to my training.  Although I missed none of the longer runs during the training through the winter months, I probably spent way too many of them on a treadmill (at least according to my Minnesota wife who regularly ran at below zero temperatures).  This included a crazy eighteen mile sermon podcast triple header (sermon podcasts seemed a better fit for long runs because with songs I couldn't stop myself from mentally counting in the double digits how many more I had to go which needless to say is a bit depressing).

Months had passed by with a lot of trips, vacation and business, and more running.  Always timing, checking pace, recording every run and Googling various aspects of running led Mary to mention several times you can not engineer your way to the end of a marathon and I should be more like a runner and listen to my body.  It even seemed safe to let the wider world know I was running a marathon sometime in January or February, or maybe after the 20 miler at the far end, but who knows, after all during some of the long runs I had to walk some... why take chances?  Plus there were other things going on, so mostly just let people know when it came up in conversation, often mentioning, but you know Mary has run two (she is a runner)!

During the taper, a three week period of shorter rather than longer training runs before the race, I started to relax a little.  After all, pretty much nothing more I could do better at this point.  However I did do plenty of research and planning (is the engineer still coming through?), doing the carb-loading, how to get there planning, what to wear weather watching etc... and scheduled off the day before the marathon (Friday) to do packet pickup and not be stressed by random work issues that somehow manage to strategically crop up right at the end of the day.  That day when I woke up, I suddenly had a totally new thought.

I am a runner.

But little did I know the adventure awaiting me the next morning... (to be continued)