We are underway for the 2011 Blogathon. For every ten dollars that you donate to Special Kids, I will make a new update on consecutive days. And there are a variety of other hilarious and humiliating things you can make me do while benefiting charity! Right now, the Blogathon is at Six Days long and counting. Any donation you can make will be greatly appreciated. If I were more clever, I would design some type of banner to signify this event. But I digress. The Blogathon is spontaneously clever rather than clever in its strong planning and solid design.
Now, onto the main event. I figured I'd talk a while about how training went and how the good people at Team ASK were absolutely essential to my success. As I mentioned last time, running was not so much a hobby for me as it was my archenemy. I'd try taking it up from time to time, but it'd always end the same way: about three quarters of a mile of intense effort, followed by a quarter mile of seriously reevaluating my decision. In the months before signing up for the half marathon, I had taken up biking and loved it. While I was wrong about how much it helped, my skill at biking did a lot to convince me to try running. However, I'll talk about my motivations for running the half marathon another time.
My first Saturday run with Team ASK was a glorious, well intentioned disaster. I had gotten an awesome track suit at Belk's for under $20. It pays to wait until mid-February to get your winter apparel. I had my newish Nikes and had a lot of biking under my belt. I was convinced I would tear up the four mile run that my coach, Margaret Clark, had scheduled for that Saturday morning. I couldn't have been more wrong. As always, I got through the first three quarter miles just fine. And then the fourth quarter rolled around and I remembered just why every other attempt at running failed miserably. Typically, this would be where I started walking the rest of the way and declare it a moral victory. Fortunately, Margaret would have none of that. And this is where the insight started to roll in. Rather than just tell me to suck it up or run harder, Margaret gave me the first of three great pieces of advice that day: try running two minutes then walking one minute.
Having nearly completed my training, I can say that pace is ridiculously easy and slow and it just about killed me by mile two. The day after I was so sore I could barely move. Still, that advice was the foundation of my training. Anyone who tells you running is easy has been far removed from the time they started running. Starting to run is immediately hard and exhausting and the benefits are dispersed and long term. You finish your first run sore, sweaty, and near delirious and you're not looking better than when you started. I understand why most people don't want to do it, but, in the end, it is completely worth it. I am grateful every day that I didn't give up.
The next great piece of advice Margaret gave me was a comprehensive schedule of training. This may seem minor, but for a novice like me, the guidance was invaluable. Even though I could barely move, I got up the day after my first run and tried my best to complete the two mile "recovery" run at the Run 2 Walk 1 pace. I got about 1.6 miles before calling it quits. I did fail to uphold the schedule right out of the gate, but that's not the point. The point is the schedule helped me run 1.6 miles further than I would've thought I should run and certainly 1.6 miles further than I wanted to run. Every journey has to start somewhere and mine began by trudging around my subdivision at terrapin speeds.
The final piece of advice began a series of events I like to call "Hunter Knows Nothing About Equipment". The first thing Margaret pointed out was that I needed proper running shoes. I couldn't fathom how Nike sneakers could be anything less than awesome at all things. But sure enough, once I switched to full fledged running shoes later that day (and got some padded socks), I could tell a difference. It wasn't a magic bullet that made running as pleasant as sleeping in, but it did remove a lot of the impact shock from running. That began a series of small but critical lectures that made running much less of a nightmare. She helped me with topics such as properly hydrating before running, how to hydrate while running with a water belt, how to replenish electrolytes by using magic energy cubes, how to avoid becoming horribly nauseous by eating too many energy cubes on the run, what power bar is the most delicious, and why you should hate running up hills with every fiber of your being.
I'd like to end this post by talking about how much better the my second long run was. I'd like to, but I can't. While I did go further and faster than I had ever gone before (5 miles at a Run 3 Walk 1 pace), by the end I was sorer than I had ever been. My right plantar fasciitis (also known as the injury that tortured Antonio Gates owners in fantasy football) was killing me by the end of the run. It was so bad that when I drove home, it actually hurt me to push down on the brakes. But I iced it for over an hour when I got home, gave my foot an extra day of rest and then went right back to the schedule. Today, I run at a pace of 9 minutes running, 1 minute walking and routinely go twice as far as my first Saturday run.
Running is hard, brutal, painful and worth every minute.
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