Things are different this time around. For my first marathon I trained to walk with the goal of finishing in 8.5 hours. Some of you may remember that in a terrible, painful long day it took me about 13 hours to finish the Seattle Marathon with my Best Friend. This marathon has an 8 hour time limit but they open the roads at 6 hours so it’s 8 hours while contending with traffic lights, no port-a-potties etc. So this time I’ll be doing a run/walk combination, and Kelrick has once again volunteered to do this with me.
One of the things that I promptly forgot when I finished the first marathon, (when I was so sure that I would never ever do another one) was how freaking boring the training is. I train alone late at night (it’s always interesting to me that people congratulate those who get up at 4am to run, but freak out that I go out at 2am) and a lot of times it’s just a grind. I’m doing this marathon for a lot of reasons that I’ll get into in later posts, but a love of running/walking is not one of them. I’ll take this opportunity to remind everyone reading that I’m not trying to be any kind of role model here, nor am I interested in being part of the bullshit good fatty/bad fatty dichotomy This is about my desire to do a marathon and nothing else.
Music has been a really important part of my training, so much so that I actually rescheduled a run last time because my iPod wasn’t working. It helps me to have some ritual around music as I do my run/walks, especially as they get longer. This time around it’s:
Beginning: Mama Told Me Not To Come (In honor of a hilarious e-mail from my awesome mom)
Half-way: Hold On, I’m Coming by Sam and Dave
End: Rebel Beat by the Goo Goo Dolls
Outside of that one of my favorite past times is creating playlists for different training run/walks- for this marathon I have different ones for speedwork, tempo runs, and hill repeats so far. If you have ideas for inspirational songs please feel free to drop them in the comments!
So I have 43 weeks of training until I show up for my next ass kicking. Cross finish line, get medal.
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