The goal in sight

The half-marathon I committed to running more than six months ago (on my 42nd birthday) is three days away. That's kind of scary, but not as much as it was earlier. During the beginning parts of my training, even when I moved from run/walking to finishing 5K and 10K races, I kept thinking that I hadn't even run half of the distance of my goal.

I had struggled at the 5-mile mark, but made it past. Same for six and seven miles. Something good happened during my first 8-mile run, when I swear I made it easier than the previous week's seven. Plus, now I was over the halfway point to my goal. The attached email below describes how that mostly continued as my mileage increased, with one tough week in between.

Just like the running books say, I'm beginning to know my body and what it's ready to do...or not. When I was running 4,5,6 miles, I still was feeling good about midweek runs of 2-3 miles. My crosstraining on the offdays dropped to nil (possibly a mistake) because I needed the rest. When I've built up to 9-10 miles on my long runs, my knees ache for days after and I'm pretty tired every evening. So much so that I took the whole week off after that big run. And while that helps me make the next big run (like my goal this weekend), I think a better routine for my body would be something more like 5 miles on the weekend, and a couple 2-3 mile runs during the week.

The 5Ks are fun, and the 10k was a great challenge. One that I knew I could make, but was still work. That seems like a good distance for me, one to keep working on, improving my times.

But this close to my goal, I'm not about to change now! No, I'm going to push through this half-marathon the way I said I would. At least now I'm pretty confident I can do it.

-Mark

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Johnson
Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:21 AM
Subject: Re: How was your marathon?
To: Jessie Hunt


Yeah, my race is on Sunday. I feel a lot better about it this week
than I did the previous one. My last three Sundays have been 9.5, 10,
and 10.5 miles, but after the second one I was concerned. My right
knee has always been a little tweaky, but even my left was hurting
after the 10 miles. I also was really tired, walked some, and went
through all of my water.

But I figured I did a few things wrong, namely starting when it was
too warm and not having enough water (and any fuel) with me. I didn't
run at all for several days. Then I hydrated like mad the night
before, got an earlier (cooler) start, had better stuff to listen to
on my MP3 player, and even tried out some of those carb/electrolyte
fuels along the way. Figured I'd experiment on a trial run rather than
the real deal.

It went much better! I ran for time, not distance, going for just over
2 hours, then later mapping it online to find it was 10.5 miles. I
know I could've gone farther, too, so I'm crossing my fingers that
I'll be ok on Sunday. Best of all, although my legs are sore, I don't
feel the same knee pain. I think I'm ready!

-Mark