Marathon (not half!) Training Season has begun!

...on kind of an anticlimactic note. 

i did work hard the other day to make a plan--well, i actually worked harder on making an excel spreadsheet than i did on developing the plan, but no matter!  pressing on!-- to ramp me up from half-marathoner to full-marathoner by november, in time for the NEW YORK CITY MARATHON that i sure hope i get into in the lottery, but seeing as i "started" it on monday but have yet to run a step and it's now thursday i'm feeling a bit sheepish.  baah.  the james assures me i have plenty of time so i am trying to listen to her; i know she's right, i structured my plan to end in august so i'd have time to assess and tailor the last two months once i see where i've gotten to with it...but still.  nothing like an uninspiring start to not-catapult you to greatness. 

so.  i shall catapult instead by stealing Thankful Things Thursday from one of my favorite bloggers, as i've been meaning to for months.  (other things on my to-steal-from-blogs-i-like list: blogging on a regular basis; posting nearly as many pictures as words; actually working out so i can talk about it; the ecard meme; a great many recipes, and at least sounding like i have a positive outlook on life.  if you do or have one of these things, look forward to feeling flattered when i finally get around to copying you.  it's the sincerest form of flattery and also blogging.  everyone's doing it.)  i'm going to have to go easy tho, as i'm not used to this.  snark-demon, heel!

i am thankful...that my ankle is not sprained really anymore!  it's healed to the point that i often forget it's at less than 100%, and have come close to re-injuring it several times bc i forgot.  things that last longer than a week = hard for me to comprehend.  i literally forgot how old i was the other day and told someone the wrong number.  it would be cool if there was a memento-like explanation for this that i'll later become aware of. :)

i'm thankful..that i have some interesting work.  super-secrecy and pesky ethics don't allow me to divulge exactly what i'm doing, but it is worth mentioning that i'm doing some interesting technical stuff right now that stretches my brain to the limits-- i'm always happy when that happens, and when i can feel like what i do makes a difference...i learned a lot today and you would too if i could share it with you but i can't so just quit bugging me.  but, you can do yourself a favor and google something that normally wouldn't hold your attention for very long, such as "how does my microwave actually work" or "where does plastic come from"- the internets have really an unbelievable amount of information now and there is no excuse for not knowing something interesting anymore!  shit is fascinating!

i'll just go ahead and be grateful for the internet now too, while i'm at it.  nT loves a bit by Louis CK where he talks about how amazing it is to fly *in a plane* that it's fucked up for people to be impatient about it- actually, thanks again internet!!, i'll just find it for you:

he is hilarious and it's hard not to agree, isn't it?  i found myself explaining encyclopedias to my 9yo the other day, and he was looking at me like i was crazy.  i also caught myself telling him "i remember this song bc it's on one of the albums i ordered from columbia house when i was in middle school..." remember columbia house??  how fucking cool was that shit-- and how much cooler is it now that we can have ten times as much stuff *instantly*.  maybe in a way we had a more visceral connection to things when they were more tangible, maybe the anticipation while waiting for things made us cherish them more...but the upside is that now we can have and do so much of what we want that we don't even notice it most of the time.  so, internet, i take a moment to salute you!

i'm grateful for online running advice and training plans.  without them i'd probably still be color-coordinating my running calendar and making up interval workouts to try, instead of biting the bullet and actually going out there. which, as i said i haven't done yet but nevertheless, i'm closer because of you!

i'm grateful i picked an awesome yoga school that has a big language component; i didn't even realize until i started how much my life was missing another dead language!  ooh sanskrit, you lull me.  someone mentioned it's used, or can be used, to write machine code.  that is really cool, but i'm too lazy to check le internet and find out if it's true. 

i'm thankful i and mine are all healthy and whole, which makes speaking to each other or getting along really just luxuries that can be put off to another time.  if anyone was sick, we'd probably feel obligated to slap on a grimace smile and force our presence on each other, but no one is so we can safely ignore whoever we want to and put off feeling guilty about it till later!  an obviously healthy way to look at family dynamics!  this is what gratitude sounds like, i assure you!

i'm super grateful for my sparkly vegas cup.  i've managed to keep hold of it since my birthday/half marathon trip in december (see aforementioned memento-problem) and it makes drinking water so festively pleasant!  i <3 you, special cup!

i'm grateful for uncharacteristic surface-of-the-sun weather, even though it looks to be mostly over.  it was fun while it lasted, and i did have many moments of quiet appreciation just marvelling at the happiness of a 60* day in arizona.  i'm going to see just how long i can hang onto those lovely memories.  you may want to start a stopwatch. 

i'm grateful for more opportunities than i can shake a stick at. the james and i have on our wishlist way more races than we can conceivably get ourselves to, i have lots of other half-baked travel plans on my mind for this year, and new things keep popping up.  i tend to feel the pang of 'oh no!' when i miss something, but i'm flipping the coin over right now and realizing, having too many awesome things to do and having to prune the list is exactly the kind of problem i want to have.  much better than not enough! 

Bleagh.

So.  I am running another half marathon (#16!) on Saturday, and, in a rare occurrence, I am *not* looking forward to it.  I realize spraining my ankle and eating my way through the holidays, as well as running both the Disneyworld half and relay AND the Disneyland half marathon in January (yes, you read that right.  three half marathons in one month on a freshly sprained ankle.  don't congratulate me yet.) are all enough to explain it...but the half-hour hit my times have taken since December just has me in a funk.  I ran a 2:41 in Vegas (fast for *moi*, okay?) in December and then two months later ran a 3:17 at Tinkerbell.  Yes, I should have wrapped my ankle.  Yes, I didn't rest enough after the DW insane back-to-back two weeks prior.  Yes, I realize it is ridiculous to be at all competitive in this slow a bracket.  (Yes, sometimes people walk faster than I run.  Fuck off.)  But I yam what I yam and I'm really not looking foward to posting another dismal time.  I just don't like seeing them come up on the clock!

So, I've picked up the "Run Less, Run Faster" Furman plan, but have been struggling a bit with it...the other day I had a total crisis of confidence worrying whether it will actually make me faster or not.  Um, it's called "run less, run FASTER", duh!  I guess it's just testament to how disillusioned I am at the moment.  I know, I'm hard to please.  Anyway, because of that I think I'm going to step back to the RLRF 5k plan (even though yes I know I'm planning on running NYC and need to train for that-- later.) for a few months and see if I can't (can!) get my short-distance times up.  If anything it'll mean shorter workouts, which I'll be glad to see.  :)  And hopefully I'll get some results that will get me back to my usual delusional optimism regarding what I'm capable of. 

Like Florence Foster Jenkins, I much prefer my own delusions to the harshness of reality.  "The truth hurts"?  Well, get it out of here then!  I have a nice pillowy blanket of marshmallow clouds and chicken eyelashes here to sink into, while I dream of being able to jump eight feet straight into the air and singing at Rockefeller Center....(shut up I can sing wherever I want to, it's my dream and I like singing in skating rinks.)

What do I want for my birthday? A pr.

So, I don't care that this is somewhat (wildly) impractical: I want a pr in vegas in december.  For me, that would technically be anything under 2:40, but I'm going to randomly reset the bar and insist that I beat it by ten minutes.  All this, ladies and gentlemen, without running (much) in the meantime.  Why? Because that's what I feel like today!  Perhaps I shall run tomorrow, if I can talk my mom into running the trail race that's happening in the morning. :)

So, for a 2:30 pr, coolrunning's pace calculator says I need to beat 11 1/2 minute miles.  That's about 5.3 mph (I like mph so much better than min/mile, don't you?  Who even thinks that way?  It's so hard!), which is quite speedy for me... Maybe I'll run just a tiny bit to train, then...

Can't wait for the trip, either way.  Sad that we won't make the Great Santa Run like we did last year, but I suppose there might be some kind of limit to how many pictures of yourself in cheap santa suits you need to have.  They are great though, no?

So behind!

ahh i have so many race recaps to post and things i should update about- but as i'm sick (and still sitting here thinking about running, wow) i'm just going with random thoughts.  i'll have to post some proper stuff and back-date it later.

so jealous of this race and want it to come here!  damn you nyc for being cooler than us, and getting everything first!  if you live there you should totally do this bc if i were you i would but i'm not so i'm so far away!  zombi race

getting quite nervous about january's plan...i've looked at several marathon training plans (since i figure that's basically what i'm training for; the night's sleep in between halves [halfs -?] is just a bonus...), but they all count distance rather than time.  training by time worked superbly in getting me here, and i want to stick with what works...my problem is, i'm coming up against some limiting factors in trying to scale my model up; namely, if i run at the same pace i've been, that means it will take SIX LONG HOURS to finish a full marathon.  that's kind of a deal-breaker, party people.  and obviously i can't train for that, going out and doing 4+ hour long runs on the weekends between now and january-? methinks this will represent too much strain on the ole bod.  i've read some opinions that long runs should be capped at 3.5 hours--but clearly this will not take me 26 miles.  more thinking needs to be done (to say nothing of more running!), and it needs to be done fast as there are only 2 1/2 months between me and (w)D(w)-day!

Ever the Run(plan)ner...

So, can't wait for the muddy pictures from Warrior Dash to be posted! Grateful in the meantime to Th James for taking some great 'before's :)

(altho, this is actually 'after', having been hosed down and changed, as you can tell from Mah Medal)

It was hilarious and I can't wait to do another one!  Especially as James n I sort-of-on-purpose blew the curve by walking most of the way between obstacles; should be easy to set a PR now that there's a (very low) bar to compare it to! I was surprised and gratified by how not-foreign it felt to clamber over stuff and fling myself through obstacles; aside from the running, as soon as it was over I wanted to do it again.  Apparently, my life doesn't contain enough things for me to climb...

The comparative un-success of the running part was a bit eye-opening tho: San Diego is a month away!  Half the time I glance at seven shiny medals on my wall I think, "no brainer! Just show up!"-- the other half I look and think, "who the hell ran 91 miles for those?! Bc I wouldn't get up right now for a donut."

So I'm thinking, I might train.  Like I said I would last post.  With the five weeks I have left!
Apart from total Sloth, I think the biggest thing that's been in my way is not having a clear plan.  I know I grabbed the marathon plan quickly enough, but as far as halfs my big question is how to get faster--and I hate all the complex vo2max crap and vocab-driven calculations everyone suggests.  Fartleks, I guess I could handle...intervals, yeah...tempo pace, speed runs...FUCK! Shut up already, I'm tired just filling out my calendar.  I got here because the plan was excuse-shatteringly simple, and methinks that might be the key to lasting success: "run 5, walk 2".  Got it.  I've had this idea before, going back to Bud Coates and just adding a faster pace guideline to the miraculously simple plan, and hopefully that means it's worth investigating.  Any case, I've pencilled in a date with the treadmill tomorrow morning to test my theory!  With any luck (read: abatement of my blogging-ADD), I'll let you know how it goes!

OH ps- as we were shambling along between the straw bales and rickety balance beam (and cracking up at the eventual Quote of the Day: "I can't believe the waiver for this was only one page!"), a fellow (slow) runner overheard us talking about the similar Spartan series of obstacle races.  He said a guy from his gym ran one recently, and as it turned out, the fire he expected to leap over rather than being two feet tall as implied actually turned out to be a six-foot wall of flame which singed most of his hair off.  And just to add a little intrigue, stationed on the other side were volunteers dressed as spartans who beat him with sticks! Perhaps this shouldn't fill me with glee- but it does.

New plan?

I'm honestly sad to have missed the lake havasu half this last weekend, and am mulling over how i'm going to get going again... I've been in an intensive acupuncture mode for the last three weeks, working on correcting some long-standing issues, which is why I've been quiet.  It's been a great process, but it's also required me to put the kibosh on running so I could direct my energy to what we were working on (read: avoid the usual "I can do it all!" dance and getting overtired and then sick).  So it's been almost a month off and the other day I caught myself thinking "I just don't know how people do that"- before suddenly remembering that, hey, I'VE done it, and not just once but seven times! What's the mystery?! But it's a telling moment: two years of training to do the impossible doesn't undo 30 years of training to define what is impossible.  And I definitely don't want inertia to carry me back to that pointless pastime, so I'm ready to move forward.

So, I think I need a new goal to work toward.  I love running the half marathon distance and definitely look forward to everything that's already on my calendar, but I think it's Firsts that excite me, and I'm ready for a new one of those...So far the full marathon distance has felt too unreasonable, but with my recent realizations and this plan I just stumbled on in the bookstore today, I'm starting to get interested...


Update- after a walk tonight I've decided I'm in.  After all, I have half this plan in the bag already! So even if I go back to basics and start at the beginning I'm only 4 months from a full marathon; that sounds good. :) 

Goals

Just read a cool article about fell running in Ireland, and it's got me thinking about what goals I have for running.  I love the idea of running in Ireland sometime, where (I suspect) it's the antithesis of desert running: green!  Not that I have to cross an international border to locate some plants, but...well, why not, after all!

So, these are some of the goals I have and have had for my running career:

Get out of bed!
Be able to run 30min straight
Run a half marathon
Sub 2:45 half marathon
Sub 2:30 half marathon
2:00 half marathon
2 half marathons a month apart
2 half marathons 2 weeks apart
2 half marathons 1 week apart
2 half marathons same weekend (DisneyWorld relay and half)
A half marathon every month (for a year-?)
Half marthon in all 50 states
Run a full marathon
Sub 3hr marathon
Run NYC marathon
Run in some other countries...
Full and half back to back (Goofy challenge)
Full, half, 5k back to back (Dopey challenge)
Run an ultra
Pace at Leadville
Run route 66
Run coast to coast

Right now a lot of these things seem kind of ridiculous- but the part of me that's already accomplished the first 4 things likes seeing them there in print. Having worked my way up through 7 halfs and counting, I really believe the distance between the bed and that first 30 minutes is greater than the difference between 6mph and 8mph, or between 26 miles and 50.  Whether it is or isn't though, I look forward to finding out.  :)