Get a Hold of Yourself Man!

Thanks for all the advice on my last post, particularly to Andrew who gave me the literary bitchslap I needed in reminding me to HDFU. I am still planning on running the full marathon, and I’m planning on beating Haile Gebrselassie’s world record time of 2:03:59, that was his first half split right?

When I originally signed up for the PF Chang’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona Marathon I had wanted to run a 4 hour marathon or more specifically a 3:59:59 marathon. I believe that a sub 4 hour time might have been possible had I not been injured and wimped out on some of my training runs, but I find myself coming to grips with the fact that I probably won’t achieve that goal. That’s OK. I’ve always said that in order to achieve all of your lifelong goals sometimes you have to lower your expectations, but that’s just the over-achiever in me coming out. (The under-achiever in me is totally OK with failing to meet goals entirely, at least the over-achiever tries to make it look like I accomplished my goals.)

With that in mind I’m going to establish several levels of goals for this marathon, and hopefully I’ll be able to accomplish one of them. Here they are, ranked from most likely to occur to least likely to occur:

1. Start the marathon.
2. Finish the marathon.
3. Finish the marathon in an upright position.
4. Finish the marathon with a time under 4 hours 30 minutes.
5. Finish the marathon with a time under 4 hours 15 minutes.
6. Finish the marathon with a smile on my face.
7. Finish the marathon with a time under 4 hours.
8. Qualify for Boston - requires a time of 3:10:59 (my computer audibly chuckled when I wrote that).
9. Set a new marathon world record - requires a time of 2:03:58 or better.
10. Take it easy and enjoy myself.

I think I have a realistic shot at the first 4, maybe even number 5 if I’m having a really good day. If I accomplish number 7, then number 6 will just naturally follow suit, but I doubt that either of those will happen. Numbers 8 through 10 are just there for humor because none of them are going to happen.

Have a great weekend everyone! Stay tuned next week for the announcement of the Shave Your 5K winners.

Update: Oh yeah, and Happy New Year and all that jazz.

One

On Saturday morning I was scheduled to run 10 miles. Unfortunately, when I woke up on Saturday I discovered that I had misplaced my motivation. As you might guess, this is a somewhat common occurrence for me and I began looking for my lost motivation in the usual places. Was it still in bed, hiding under the covers? Nope. Was it in the pantry? Nope. Was it between the cracks in the sofa? Nope. It was nowhere to be found.

Without my motivation it was going to be tough to get outside and run my 10 miler. I debated just putting the run off altogether and that's when I drew the attention of the nagging voice in my head that I think of as the runner inside of me. He used to be the jogger inside of me and I used to be able to shut him up with donuts but he's been getting a lot louder and harder to ignore in recent months. "We HAVE to go run!" he kept telling me. After an hour of unsuccessfully trying to find something else to do I begrudgingly agreed with the runner inside of me, got my gear on and headed out the door.

One of the tricks that has always worked for me when I don't feel like running is to tell myself that I'll just go run one mile and then be done. That's usually good enough to get me out the door, and then once I start running I'll go ahead and run further, usually completing the run that I was scheduled to do. It's a great trick that my inner runner plays on me, and it always works. At least it HAS always worked. On Saturday morning as I headed out for my run the runner inside of me was feeling pretty smug, but I was still not feeling very good about it at all. It came as quite shock to my inner runner when I arrived back home after having completed one measly mile. I had barely even broken a sweat and I was finished.

As I walked through the back door of our house I happened across my ever supportive wife. She looked at her watch as if to see how long I'd been gone, raised an eyebrow and asked "are you injured?" all very cleverly calculated to make me feel guilty. Don't think for a second that she needed to look at her watch to know how long I'd been gone or that she thought I might be injured. I think my inner runner had phoned ahead and asked her to be there when we got home.
"Uhhh. No. Not injured, just done" I replied. I attempted to walk past her into the house and she moved into my path. A brief discussion ensued with her trying to motivate me to go back out and run and me extolling the virtues of the one mile training run. It ended when she played what she thought was the ace up her sleeve:
"You can be done if you promise to post on your blog that you only ran 1 mile today!"

So there it is dear readers. I ran 1 mile on Saturday, sans motivation. While I'm thinking of it, if anyone finds my motivation please return it to me. It's kind of a tabby color and answers to the name Figment.