The continued prayer is, “Lord keep me focused. Keep my mind stayed on You. Help me to bring You praise. I know You believe in me. Please help me in my unbelief. Amen.”
I really have been meaning to write for months. I just haven’t been disciplined enough to make the time. But now I feel like I really need to get a goal posted!!
The Santa to the Sea Half Marathon is screaming towards us! December is just around the corner! A friend of mine, running genius and personal fitness consultant, Kim Melvin, gave me a Half Marathon training schedule. It’s about 12 weeks, which is typical, and seems quite doable.
I have never actually followed a training schedule when I was training for a Half. I just built up the miles and ran it! It seems to work for me. My position on running is that I’ll do it for as long as it’s fun. Once it stops being fun, I’ll stop doing it.
Once I discovered that focusing too much on speed robs me of the joy of running, I switched my focus and the joy returned.
Because of this, following a set schedule seemed like something that might rob my joy as well. But I can’t be sure until I try it. Maybe it will enhance the experience.
Ideally, I would run with friends. Running with friends helps with motivation, of course, but I’ve always been a rather solitary runner. For several reasons: (1) I run when I feel like it. Most times running with a group means I have to get up at the crack of dawn to meet them and I *really* hate mornings. (2) Speed has never been my main focus with running. Strength and endurance have always been the focus for me. Frankly, I don’t want to slow anyone down. If get up in the morning to run with a group that is faster than me, I end up running alone anyway. Might as well sleep in and run alone later, right? (3) I am just not a social runner. Even when I do run with others, I tend to have my headphones in and I almost never talk to people while I’m running. The only exception I can think of is my brother, who cracks me up so much during a run, I can hardly breathe. And (4) having a young family and working full-time means I am with people almost constantly. Alone time is a very rare commodity and running is my alone time. Just me and Michael and the open road and a bottle of pepper spray. Bliss.
If it seems like I’m making it excuses, I may be. I don’t know. I’ll have to try it and see.
First, I’ll have to adopt a schedule. Kim’s is awesome. Here it is:
Second, I’ll needed to find a group to run with. This came to me out of the beautiful blue. By the beautiful blue, I don’t mean the sky, I mean the Facebook blue.
Lina, a runner friend of mine posted that she was in search of someone who wanted to get up at 7:00am on Saturday to run 7+ miles with her.
As you all know, I am a person of Faith. I had been praying for the discipline to get up early to get the serious miles in. My relationship with God is very long-standing, so I have no idea why it always surprises me when He answers my prayers so swiftly. One must be careful what one prays for.
So up I got at 6:00am, so I could fuel up and leave for the agreed upon meeting place. A park, about a mile and a half from my house. A mile and a half is a perfect warm-up so I set out feeling pretty good.
When I got to the park, Lina wasn’t there yet, so I took the time to stretch and breathe.
When she showed up, looking cute and sweet and super fast, we exchanged pleasantries, briefly shared expectations (Me: Feel free to pull ahead. I am super slow and getting faster is not the goal for me / Lina: Ok, cool. Let’s go!) and hit the road.
It was a route that I am very accustomed to. I was very comfortable and the pace I kept was Half Marathon pace for me (about 12:30 min/mi).
This run was all joy. I hope we get to do it again sometime.
So! Now that I have a schedule and a friend to train with, I should be ready to go! Right? RIGHT!
I’ll keep you posted!
May 21st, 2015 – 3.04 Mile Run
This was just a maintenance run. Tuesday was calls for 3 miles. I did 3 miles. Doing 3 miles is fun. There’s not much to say against a 3-mile run.
It was humid but breezy. I ran it right after work and I didn’t take the time to fuel up properly or even hydrate appropriately. But it was 3 miles.
Three miles to an experienced runner, is like a Chocolate Labrador puppy. It’s smart, unintimidating and… cute.
See ya on the next run!!!
