A little more than one year ago, I ran my first marathon. When I crossed that finish line, I was not immediately sure I wanted to do another full 26.2 mile race. And then less than a week later, I wrote a post clearly defining my intentions: “Yes, I’ll Have Another.”
Well, that another came rather quickly, and this past Sunday I ran my second marathon, again at the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. Continue reading
I have always been good at math. Despite what former Harvard President Larry Summers said about girls not being good at math, I outdid the boys and won my high school’s senior math award.
Like Cady Herron in Mean Girls, I’ve always liked math. Not so much because it’s the same in every country, but rather because I love that feeling of accomplishment when you come up with a solution to a difficult problem. You always know there will be answer, it’s just your job to figure out the best way to solve for it. Granted, I have not taken a math class since my freshman year at Georgetown, which was nothing like the challenge of 12th grade calculus, but I still enjoy channeling my nerd self with a good math problem. Continue reading
When you spend upwards of two to three hours with people moving on your feet, you have a lot of time to talk. About everything.
Like last Saturday’s long run, for example. As I headed out among the faster crew for our 10-mile run, the conversation began with my discovery that father-daughter dances are still a thing. I could have sworn political correctness killed them just a few years after my own dances with my dad years ago. Continue reading
I was a nerd in high school.
Straight up nerd.
I did mock trial and history fairs and perhaps the nerdiest of them all, Academic Decathlon, a ten-event scholastic competition that required me to willing give up a weekend to take tests and give interviews and speeches.
So I don’t deny my nerd title. In fact, I embrace it.
Yet in spite of my nerdiness and my ambition, there was someone at my high school who felt that my lack of athletic ability did not warrant my standing as the top student of my class.
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The hardest part these days of running is not the actual exercise. It’s the getting out of bed to do it.
After telling myself that this winter’s training would be different from my last and vowing to stick to my scheduled SLRs, I spent a morning nestled under my covers. Even before the morning came I had already turned off my alarm and decided that I was going to use my Sunday for my long run and bypass the typical Saturday routine. I expected much of my fellow crew runners to do the same in postponing their runs, but when I reunited with the group last week, I heard from those who ran 7-8 miles in temperatures struggling to break out of the teens. Several ran with frozen GPS watches that failed to track their brave feat on that icy, bitter morning.
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But busy isn’t an excuse to let it go by.
Running is back in my life full-time, so my days have become that much chock-full. I have stuck to my training plan and recommended mileage. It’s just that with running comes hunger. And fatigue. And passing out at 930 PM because sitting up straight to write a blog post is the last thing you want to do at the end of the day.
But I won’t say I have been too busy to blog. No, that would be making an excuse. While, yes, my days have been long and tiring, there were several instances this week when I could have taken an hour to write something to share. However, I consciously chose not to in favor of using that hour for more sleep or catching up with old friends or reading the newspaper that has been in it’s bag since Sunday. Continue reading
A marathon is hard.
It is 26.2 miles of effort, sweat and energy. They are never easy, and by they finish you feel a combination of relief, excitement, and pain. Yes, after more than two dozen miles on your feet, everything starts to hurt.
But there are things in life that hurt, and are much harder, than a marathon.
Like when it hurts to receive bad news at 530 PM on a Monday.
When it hurts more when less than 18 hours later, you receive additional bad news while sitting at your desk eating lunch.
When it hurts to know you can’t be with the people who you love and know are hurting worse than you.
When it hurts to know that you can’t even remember the last conversation you had with someone who you will never see or hug again.
When it hurts to miss someone who is no longer in your life.
When it’s hard not to cry in the middle of the work day when that is really all you want to do.
When it’s hard not to tell people what is truly bothering you when they ask “how are you?”
When it’s hard to admit that you don’t want to be alone when you cry.
When it’s hard to tell someone that you want them to stay, even when you know they can’t.
While none of these things physically hurt, the pain is nothing compared to a marathon. But even it the hurt from these things is different, my marathon experience has taught me that I have the strength to keep moving, literally. Although some days the suffering hurts more than others, you take each day at a time, hopeful that tomorrow will be better and there will at least be someone out there willing to run the course with you.
Yesterday as I was sifting through one of my notebooks during an office meeting, I found a list of my goals for 2014. Crafted at the start of the new year, I made a list of things I wanted to achieve and get in a habit of doing. In the midst of trying to cook three times a week (fail), read two books a month (some months were a fail), and heading to California (I made it kind of close), I wrote “Fall Marathon.”
And here I am, four days out from checking off that item.
At 22, I’m going to run a marathon. Continue reading
One day in May I laid in bed for nearly 24 hours. I just laid there. As much I tried, I couldn’t sleep; no matter how many melatonin pills I took, my body wouldn’t shut down.
Thoughts repeated over and over. When I finally dared to look at myself in the mirror, even the bags under my eyes could not fully encapsulate how mentally and physically fatigued I felt. I was weak.
Eventually I fell asleep. Then the next day I woke up. And I ran. Continue reading
Fall is here, and my running body knows it.
The sun is not rising until nearly 7 AM, and it is setting nearly 12 hours later; daylight hours are getting shorter and shorter. Now the mornings call for sweaters and scarfs, and hot coffee (or pumpkin spice latte) is the obvious choice for the morning’s pick me up.
As my body adapts to the weather by swapping out shorts for pants and light blouses for blazers, so too is my body adapting to the cooler temperatures through my running.
Waking up this past week since the fall equinox, my alarm has coincided with pitch black darkness. Sunrise remains at least twenty minutes away when I begin my morning runs, which means running through streets still lit by the street lights and birds still not alert enough to realize that morning is upon them.
Yet even as I run down shaded roadways, I’m reminded why this time of year is the perfect time to be a runner. My skin feels a slight tingle when I walk out the door and realize that the humidity has finally left the city and been replaced by a refreshing chill. As my feet hit the pavement, the hard crunch of leaves breaks up the silence on my path.
My pace picks up, too, No longer pushing myself through swampy feel-like temperatures or sunshine burning down on my bare shoulders, my body settles into a comfortable pace that is remarkably speedy, yet comfortable; it’s not as challenging as it felt previously to run sub eight, even sub 7:45, min/miles. It seems I have hit my groove.
Maybe that groove can be attributed to the last three months of effort. Leading up to October, I have spent the majority of my marathon training running in temperatures over 80 degrees and relentless humidity, with the awkward tan lines to prove it. Now with fall’s arrival and the big race less than a month away, my optimism is beaming.
As I hope to stay strong and healthy, October will be a month of self-care and dedication. I have worked so hard up to this point. The hardest thing between now and race won’t be my 20-miler on Saturday, but rather ensuring that nothing gets in the way of me crossing the finish line on October 26. I can’t control the weather that day, but I can control how my body performs.
Sure, something could go wrong, but I can’t let myself focus on those “ifs.” Earlier this year a situation had me spending too much time doubting myself and whether I should have taken certain actions to avoid what led to an unfortunate result. But rather than letting myself do that through this process, I am staying optimistic; I know I have worked hard and when it comes time for race day, I don’t want to have any doubts about whether I am ready. Because I will be.
Bet(h)any Miles 