Monday, March 03, 2014

Marathon Training

Now that it is March, Boston Marathon training is in full swing! January saw a slow start to training for me. I missed every Tuesday night Greater Boston Track Club practice because of a sick kid or working husband or sick me. In February, I made it to practices and started getting in substantial mileage. I even forced myself to jump into a race and sort of accidentally won.

It was a set of two races actually - a 5-mile race and a 3.7-mile race that started together and shared the same finish line. I entered the 5-mile race. When we started, there were a zillion people in front of me. And since it was my first race in a very long time, I figured I wouldn't be in the mix for the win so I did not pay attention to how many pony tails there were in front of me. It probably wouldn't have mattered because a mile or so into the race, the course split and the 3.7-milers turned while the 5-milers plodded onward. I could see one woman ahead of me, but I was sure there were more ahead of her.

I purposefully did not glance at my watch for fear that it would reveal that I'd only been running for five minutes or something when it felt like much longer; there were no mile markers in this race, so I didn't have any sense of pace. I resisted the urge until I recognized a street name from the course map and assumed we must be within a mile of the finish. I glanced at my watch, confirmed that I must be nearly done, and picked up the pace. I caught the woman ahead of me, but by now we had joined up with the 3.7-mile racers again so there were women everywhere. I finished strong, crossed the line without fanfare, high-fived Bruce and Phoebe, and went for a quick cooldown.

The woman that I'd chased caught up with me and cooled down with me. She said she thought I had won! I returned to the post-race party, fed Oliver while chugging a few waterbottles, and collected my prize: a box of chocolates and a gift card to a running store. My time wasn't super impressive, but considering the previous month's training and the current inconsistent sleep it wasn't bad either.

That seems to be the theme of my training this time around: not impressive, but not bad considering blah blah blah excuses blah blah blah. Most days the victory isn't the number of miles I racked up or the amount of time it took me to do the miles but it's the fact that I got out of the door (or even out of bed...) after 4 hours of interrupted sleep. I realize this is likely going to translate into my personal worst marathon time by a lot, but it is going to be a victory in itself. I am already excited to toe the line in Hopkinton and run all the way back to Boston - even if it takes me hours longer than it usually does.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Erica said...

I love the Bradford race, it's a fun one. Congrats on winning!

6:25 PM  

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