Life After a Half Marathon

There isn't one...















Totally kidding!

I did REALLY enjoy taking a week of exercising. I know I should have been cross-training, but whatever. Sometimes you just want to do nothing... so I did and it was glorious!

I've been reading about this phenomenon of the "post marathon blues" where runners have a hard time adjusting to life again. The past few months were spent diligently training with a goal in sight, and now I'm supposed to be aimless...

Instead I've started making training plans for another half marathon at the end of June. Chris and I are crazy enough to try it all over again! Then I'm pretty sure I'm looking at the Portland full marathon in October...

As trite as this is going to sound, running the half marathon totally changed my life. It's the perfect example of how lots of small goals can become a major change in your life. Like miles, for example. This time last year I would set out to run a mile on the treadmill, and fall about 3/4 of a mile short because it was sooooooo hard!

So instead I focused on quarters of a mile, then after many months I was able to run three miles without stopping. Then I decided to take on the half marathon and added a mile a week. Some runs were harder than others, but before I knew it I could run 10 miles!

A few months ago I was convinced the human body was not supposed to run 26.2 miles straight. Hey, that's why the first dude who did it died immediately afterward. You hear all these horror stories of people's bodies shutting down and losing toe nails, and bloody nipples... and worst of all you have to run for like 5 hours... sounds more like torture than a hobby.

After the half marathon we met up with a friend of mine, and her sister and friend. All of them ran the full marathon, and this wasn't their first one.

Sarah, in an act or recklessness that I can totally appreciate, upgraded to the full marathon, even though she had planned (and trained) for the half. Luckily, she ran a full marathon a couple months ago so she had enough of a running base to survive.

Cat, the super-human athlete woman, just finished her marathon in less than four hours! And was able to walk and talk about it! (Apparently on her long runs she sets into a casual pace of 8 minute miles...) The other two finished in a little after five hours.

Cat had the revelation that when she looked back on her marathon, there wasn't a second where she wasn't pushing as hard as she physically could. I ran my half marathon in the exact opposite way. I look back on my half as two and a half hours of concentrated restraint.

We all had lunch and talked about shoes (haha, running shoes!), running, race locations, goals, and pacing. We casually discussed running 16 and 17 miles, as though this is what normal people do. The Sarah's and Cat encouraged me to run a full. And I left the lunch truly believing that I can do it.

One of the main reasons was that one of the Sarah's was saying that in her training runs she only got up to 16 miles before running the full marathon...

16 miles is only 3 more than what I had run earlier that day...

Although I didn't feel like I could have done 26 that morning, I definitely could have done 16...

Then it's just a couple more miles to 20...

Hmm... maybe this lofty marathon goal pretty attainable after all...