While I’m really proud that I ran a half-marathon and still have the shiny medal to prove it, THANK GOD THE TRAINING IS OVER! Yes, that is deserving of big, blocky, all-capital letters. My training program took all the fun out of exercise, and exercise is hard enough to do when it is fun.

Some days I would look at my training schedule and think, “Oh, dear Lord. I have to run 45 minutes tonight or else I’m going to collapse in a pile of goo at mile 10 on race day.” That was the dreadful thing, knowing that I had to do these long-ass runs or else I might not be able to complete the race. And I’d already told a bazillion people I was running a half-marathon, so I had to do it. The training took up so much of my time, that I eventually stopped doing anything but running for the last month, completely neglecting weight training or core strengthening exercises. My exercise routing became very unbalanced.

I still like to run, but 20-30 [...]

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There was no rain on my final group training run, but it was rather gloomy and chilly. So, I can officially say the weather for every Saturday morning long run of my half-marathon training sucked. Not a nice day in the dozen.

Our final long run before the Mini-Marathon was uneventful. I came. I ran. I drank Gatorade. It was all so normal it was almost mundane, which is a good thing, because it means I’m prepared for the race. Our group leader said it was common for people to get jitters the week before the race, but I feel as cool as the Gatorade I was drinking. I’ve been doing the running and I know I’ll be able to finish. I’ll probably get anxious-excited the night before the race, but only out of anticipation, not worry.

There was one weird thing about the final run. I was only a block away from the end point at the running store when I had to run past a wooden porch next to a local restaurant. There were half [...]

• Continue reading "One week, 13.1 miles, 10 gnarly toes"

As I left the apartment this morning to meet with my running group, I felt like I’d forgotten something. I used to get this feeling in elementary school if I’d left my Care Bears lunchbox in the kitchen. Then I figured it out. I wasn’t wearing my hat. Or mittens. Or three-layers of sweat-wicking activewear. It was actually…pleasant out. Not quite warm enough to qualify as “nice” or “lovely,” but not a reenactment of the last ice age either.

Once I got to the running store, we took off down the canal towpath for 60 minutes, our longest run before the half-marathon in two weeks. (Two weeks!) The first 5-10 minutes of running are always the hardest for me. As soon as I start jogging, my body is like, “Hey now, why are you running? We were just sitting down or lying bed. Let’s get back to that, shall we?” At the beginning, I compare how I feel running to how I felt sitting down, which is of course worse. Once I’ve been going to awhile, [...]

• Continue reading "Raindrops keep falling on my head"

I woke up at 6:15am this morning to run a 15K, which was about 1 minute too late to get into the full parking garage. Thankfully my mother drove me down to the race, otherwise I might have used that as an excuse to turn around and forget the whole thing. Instead, I tumbled out of the car half asleep and wandered to the check-in area as she went to park in a surface lot.

The 15K scared me. I’d never run that far or that long before. My training schedule had called for a 1 hour and 45 minute run a couple weeks earlier, but I’d had to bail on it because of a foot injury. I didn’t know what to expect, but in my best case scenario I envisioned long bouts of walking near the end. Worst case? I hoped I wouldn’t start crying like a little girl on the side of the road during the 10-40% chance of rain.

Before the start of the race the announcer on the loudspeaker told us it was [...]

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A weather alert popped up in my computer’s system tray this morning, and if it had still been April Fool’s Day I would have thought it was a joke. It wasn’t warning me of floods or tornadoes or hail storms, it was warning me of this:

Freezing fog?! That sounds like something I’d have to face in a video game after crossing the river of lava and fighting off flying monkeys. If I went for my scheduled run, would I be flash frozen in a cube of ice, becoming a PastaQueen popsicle? I imagined myself only being discovered centuries later by archeologists who would say, “This early 21st century humanoid was part of a bizarre cult known as ‘runners.’ You can tell by her overpriced shoes and the abundance of cheesy techno music on her MP3 player.”

I looked up “freezing fog” on Wikipedia only to learn that there are eleventy-billion different types of fog: freezing fog, Garua fog, radiation fog, hail fog, upslope fog, advection fog and more. Freezing fog “occurs when liquid fog droplets freeze [...]

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