I have signed up to run the OC Half Marathon. It was my first half marathon, and this will be my 3rd time running it, and my 5th half marathon. While I have struggled with running, and had a huge lack of consistency over the last year, I FINALLY feel like I'm in a groove and training well and will be ready to go on race day.
When I started running it was simply to get me out of the house for a 20 - 45 minutes alone with no one needing anything from me. It was therapeutic, it was cathartic, it was necessary for my sanity. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the $90 I spent on my first pair of running shoes was the absolute cheapest form of therapy I could have found.
Now I started running relatively late in my life - in my mid 40's, but I think that makes me a little bit more of a bad ass. Because as you age and stuff, you have a lot of aches and pains anyway and with running and exercising, I've just added to all of that. I started running because I was scared shitless my cancer would come back, and I need to get and stay healthy as fast and as cheaply as possible, the solution was running,
So I'm kicking up my weekly mileage right now to build up my endurance for race day. I don't feel so confident as a runner that I run with people, because let's face it, I AM SLOW. Painfully slow, and I'm not sure how to speed up, so I'm working on my treadmill and doing some High Intensity Intervals to help. I don't have a coach, I follow runners on social media, and hope that what I read kicks in some knowledge that will help me.
But who am I kidding? I don't know most of the terms runners use, tempo runs, hill repeaters, PR. I just want to finish the damn race!! So that's how I roll. I will work on my endurance try to speed it up a bit, and finish at a faster time than I did the last time. I'm an old lady runner, and I'm totally cool with it. I am faster than a couch potatoe and a turtle, so I've got that going for me ;)
As I embark on this training, I have to remember, I'm healthy enough to run, I beat cancer, I fight autism x2 daily, and I am sober, a half marathon is really a piece of cake!