13.1; It Feels Better If You Practice First

It is no secret that my goal-setting skills are somewhat lacking.  That I married someone who is among the mere 3% of super-humans who sets goals then actually achieves them is yet another baffling gift from the universe.  

Despite my substantial deficiencies in the goal-setting arena, every now and then I make a plan and try really really hard to stick with it. Like in 2008, when I planned to run a half marathon every year from then until I turned 40.*  So far I'm sticking (acceptably close) to this goal, and a few weeks ago ran my fourth annual 13-miler. Except that this time I did it without training.  Not surprisingly, I don't recommend that strategy. 

Although I'd like to blame my lack of training on a supremely busy seven weeks at work during which I did little else but bond with my desk chair, the real cause was hubris.  

I'd done three of these before and I knew they didn't kill me. That’s a big deal.  Training for my first half was motivated almost entirely by the sincerely held belief that if I didn't follow the schedule to the mile I could very well collapse into a pool of public embarrassment and exhaustion anywhere along the route.

So I trained for the first one, and I flew through the first seven miles before I even thought of being tired.  It was at that carefully timed moment I slurped down the strange mass of energy known as “Goo” and powered through to the end, feeling as though I was cruising downhill from mile 11 to the finish line. 

Race finished.  Fear of death overcome.  Training for all future races (unknowingly) compromised.

The second reason I thought I could get by without training is because I had done it once before.  Last year, a friend and her husband had signed up for the Rock & Roll half in San Diego, and by the time the race came around she was pregnant and had to sit it out. She asked me to fill in for her on about 4 days notice. I figured I could handle it; I ran a few miles most morning in the canyons with my dog, had just run a decent time in the Carlsbad half in January, and was quitting my job two days before the race so if nothing else I would be able to get by on relief and sheer joy alone.  

It worked.  Though this race wasn’t as pretty as the first – my lower back was screaming by the time I finished and my time was a good 15 minutes off my best – it wasn’t all bad.  I got a t-shirt and an excellent burrito breakfast afterward and felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Untrained race finished.  Sense of athletic ability inflated.  Fear of embarrassing collapse further abated.  Ultimate death knell to responsible training imminent.

To be fair, when I signed up for this most recent race I did intend to train responsibly.  I even made it through about six weeks of scheduled training, alternating weekend long runs with sprint track workouts. I bought new shoes and cute running clothes, did an impressive 10-mile training run through towns and streets I didn’t even know existed, and generally felt like a badass. 

But then life (and work, and hubris, and God knows what-all else) got in the way and I slowly but inevitably slacked off and started to wing it.  So by the time race day came around I hadn’t run more than to catch the subway in about three weeks. 

The fact that I made it to mile 6 before implementing my fallback walk/run strategy was on its own pretty impressive. I felt I was doing my part by running not passing the 70 year old man wearing a t-shirt signed by his great-grandchildren – someone needed to be there in case he tripped and fell.  My biggest success of the day was not stopping at the medical tent, considering I eyed it with lusty eyes when I passed the first time at mile 9, then again on the switchback near mile 11.  The fact that when I got to the finish line and called my friends who had also run to meet up and they thought I had long ago bailed out of the race and gone home pretty much sums up how awesome my performance was.  

But I finished. And I’m doing another one next year. . . only this time I’m going to train for it.

**In all fairness, even this goal has had to be amended to be an *average* of one per year, since in 2009 I was hit by a car while riding my bike to work and had to sit out the running for a bit and the soonest I got around to entering a race was for January of 2011. But it was close enough so I count it.