Mission Accomplished

It's been a while since I last wrote in here, about a year I think.  I guess I haven't written because I haven't felt very motivated to write.  Today I feel motivated.  I accomplished a huge goal I set out to reach and felt like I needed to write about this journey and how I got here.

Yesterday I completed my first half marathon.  I say "first" because I don't anticipate it to by my last, in fact my actual goal is the ING NYC marathon.  I intend to keep up with the half marathons for the next year and then start training for a full marathon.  I'm not going to lie as I was finishing this half marathon, about to pass out and collapse to the ground once I crossed the finish line, I thought to myself... a FULL marathon!!  Am I crazy?  That is actually impossible to do!  As they day went on and instead of being excited that I actually finished my half marathon I started to feel upset that my actual goal of completing the NYC marathon would never actually come.  It was then that I realized I also once said a half marathon would be impossible, and in reality it was after completing a 5K that I once said to myself, I could NEVER run more than a 5K, that would be impossible!!  Looking back now its funny to think about since I run more than a 5K every single morning.

So how did I get here?  I set this goal for myself last fall.  It is something I've always wanted to do and one of those things you tend to constantly put off to anther day.  I finally decided that it was time, that if I ever wanted to run a full marathon I needed to start now.  So, in January I started running every day.  I started out slow doing small runs in the morning and continually started in increase my distance.  I ran long runs on the weekends and shorter runs during the week before work.  I can't say it wasn't challenging, besides waking up every morning at 5am to run, and besides having that long run hanging over my head every weekend we had a lot going on.  I was planning Jimmy's big 30th birthday, we were moving apartments, packing and unpacking and not to mention the disastrous first month of living here.  I was stressed out to the max and some days the runs helped relieve stress, but some days it made it worse.  Regardless of all of it I'm proud of myself for making it this far.  I have this tendency to get into things for only short periods of time.  I have to admit I really didn't think that I had the attention span to train for this long and there were definitely times when I wanted to stop, but in the end I stuck with it.

Running that race, crossing that finish line was an incredible feeling.  I can't wait to do it again!!  I honestly can't describe in words what it felt like, to work that hard for something for so long, it motivates me even more to get to that full marathon that I set out to run.

Things to change for next time:

I definitely wish I did more strength training and interval training.  I pretty much stuck to getting myself up to run every day and that was about it.  My next goal is to improve my time.  I going to try to keep up the long runs this time.  Even though I did several long runs before this race, it still felt hard towards the end.  I want to eliminate that feeling where I feel like I'm going to die and not make it at around mile 10.   I think my next half marathon is going to be in February in Walt Disney World.  A few of my girlfriends who I signed up for this race with are going to do it with me.  I'm excited to start training again!!