To start with, I asked for a pedometer for Christmas. That's the first step after all. I would need to know how many miles I was running. Then I used my birthday money to buy new running shoes, seeing as how the running shoes I was using before those were at least 7 years old. Once those two were purchased and stowed away, I looked up half marathons around the area and decided to run one on Saturday, June 5th. It was going to cost a pretty penny, but it was a goal and you gotta do what you gotta do. Last step... I created a 12 week training schedule by comparing a few template schedules online. Wait, there's another last step... actually start running. Ugh. It did help that I finally figured out how to listen to my iPod while running. For some reason my ears are weird and/or I'm just weird. The ear buds don't stay in my ears if I jostle around. Thankfully I had an awesome sweat band to hold it in place. Bright red with stars on it. Then I finished off my outfit with bright red shorts and a bright orange tank that Mark gave me. Lots of prep work... and then finally comes the actual running.
About halfway through my training program, Mark started running with me occasionally. I asked him if he wanted to run the whole training program and the half marathon with me and he said yes! It was kinda sad how I had to work up to 7 or 8 mile runs and he just joined at that point and it was a piece of cake for him. At some point, we realized that Brett and Becky were blessing their baby Katelyn the weekend we had planned to run the marathon (hehe, I still hadn't paid the money to run in the official race). Almost all the Abbott family were going to be there and we would have felt sad if we couldn't have made it. I thought about it for awhile and I realized that my goal was to run the length of a half marathon at one time, not necessarily to run an official half marathon. Besides, it was going to end up saving us a lot of money. So, because of that, we decided to continue training and then run on June 12th.
However, while we were running on May 22nd, which was going to be our last long Saturday run before the big one, we started our run planning on a 8-10 mile run. About 3 miles in though, I realized that I could either run 10 more miles that day and be done with it, or I could run 13 more miles again. Mark being the stud that he is agreed to my surprising proposal that we just run the whole thing that day. It ended up being crazy hard and probably would have been easier if we had planned on it beforehand. Because we hadn't planned on it, we started later in the day than we would have (i.e. it got pretty warm), we hadn't eaten a ton for breakfast, and we hadn't brought any snacks and/or liquid with us. We ran a 5-mile loop (that did include running from our house to the library and a park with a drinking fountain at least) twice, made a very quick stop at our apartment for some water, soda, and Ghirardelli chocolate (for the sugar), then followed by our favorite 3-mile loop through the neighborhoods by our house. We were so thoroughly exhausted. Those last few miles were terrible. I will admit that we did walk occasionally throughout, every two miles or so. Once during training we ran 7 miles without stopping and it just killed me. After we got home, we got some Gatorade from the 7-11 next door to our apartment and basically just collapsed. My body just felt like it was shutting down on me, while Mark felt pretty sick to his stomach. Eventually I got up enough energy to make us some potsticker snacks and we decided to go out to eat at Outback for a reward later that night. Here's some pictures right after the run...
Some things we went through during our training and run:
- Shin splints - Heather
- Sore knee (from a previous injury) - Heather
- Gross blood blister toes - Mark
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