seventeen

When I looked at my workout schedule at the beginning of this week, I was still hurting so much from my half-marathon last week that I didn't think I'd be up for a seventeen-miler by Saturday. Sunday was bad. Monday was bad. Tuesday was better. By Wednesday, I felt back to normal, so I didn't have a good excuse for putting off this first killer long run on the second half of my marathon training. Last night I scouted out a new route. I was too nervous to go to bed at a decent hour. I just didn't want to do it.

Lately I've been feeling like my focus on speed is taking all of the fun out of my workouts. When I was in high school I was on the swim team. I loved practice and loved my teammates, but I hated meets. I always conveniently got "bronchitis" when it was time for the big all-conference meet. I think the bronchitis was all in my head and I was just nervous for the race.

I felt the same familiar pit in my stomach last week at the half-marathon. I wanted to finish well. I wanted to run fast. I didn't want to embarrass myself. Until I crossed the finish line, the nervousness didn't subside. It was a great feeling to finish well, but I didn't enjoy the race as much as I had hoped.

On Tuesday, when I was feeling mobile enough to go back to the gym, I discovered that as part of the new gym renovations, they had installed odometers on the spin bikes. At first, I was excited for the challenge, but by the end of the workout, I was feeling like my innocence had been stripped away. For the last six months, spinning has been a break from running-- what I do where I don't keep track of times or measure how far I go. But now I can do those things, and I don't really think I like adding that dimension of competitiveness to that part of my life.

This morning, I kicked my booty out of bed and got running. After last weekend, when I felt like I was practically killing myself, I decided that I wasn't going to look at my watch, wasn't going to go all-out, and was just going to run at a comfortable pace until it was done. It was a cool, misty morning, my head was clear, and the run felt fantastic. I finished 17.1 miles in about 2:11 (I looked at the clock when I got home) which means that even though I wasn't in race mode, my time was only five seconds per mile slower than my all-out race pace last weekend. I'm finally starting to believe that I can do the marathon (I honestly think I could have done another nine miles today). I'm also contemplating leaving the watch behind. It might cost me five seconds per mile, but it would be worth it not to be stressing about my split times for nearly four hours.

My old (secret) mantra was, "Boston here I come." My new mantra? "Who cares about Boston-- just do it." I'm not a big fan of hills, anyway.

And in totally unrelated news, I'm heading to the airport in about ten minutes to pick up my mom. She'll be here (as I just informed Eddie) for nine days. She keeps an even more relentless pace than I do, so I doubt I'll have much time for blogging. I'm running the Great Pumpkin 5K on Saturday, so I'll definitely do a race report, but other than that, I may be scarce.