Status Update

I am only one week into my 30-day blog challenge and it’s official, marathon prep has fully taken over my life. The things is, I really don’t mind. That was exactly my intention.

You only run your first marathon once and when I look back on this experience I want to do it with no regrets. I don’t want to look back and think I could have written more, trained more or tried harder than I have. Between blogging, training and everything that comes with those two things, I feel focused and motivated.

Of course no plan is ever perfect. I’ve skipped runs for bad reasons, I’ve made midnight pizza runs and probably eaten too much ice cream. But what is life without pizza and ice cream? Not one I want to live.

As far as everything else goes, I want to know I at least did my best. On day 30 I made the decision not to drink any alcohol until my marathon and to refine my diet more than usual (with the exception of my cousin’s wedding last weekend as alcohol was definitely consumed there). We will see how that goes…

On the training side of things, as has been happening throughout this whole program, I am continually surprising myself. At the beginning the coaches told all of us first-timers to trust the program. It was scary because I was in such bad shape at the time but they were right, the program works.

Tonight I did a 60-minute run. I completed 9.01km with an average pace of 6:42/km. I felt good, kept my heart rate down and easily ran the 60 minutes straight. When I came home I couldn’t help but think about my 10km race at the Calgary Marathon, which I blogged about here. I ran 10km in just over 60 minutes. If I did another 10k race now, I would probably kill that time and that’s a pretty awesome feeling, especially when I remember how hard I ran to make that time in the first place.

Our next team run is a 90-minute loop through Fish Creek Park on Saturday morning. It should be beautiful and I can’t wait!

Until then I will be busy writing, trying not to eat pizza and hopefully at some point, sleeping.

P.S. The good thing about keeping really busy preparing to run a marathon is that it doesn’t give you that much time to actually think about running the marathon. But that’s still a little terrifying.