Crawling Back

Hello, abandoned blog. I'm still here. I ran the Chicago marathon last October in 5:04 and change, and I've been working on a long-form piece about it that I hope to have published somewhere that will either pay me for it or at least publish it inside something with a glossy cover. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I've followed the path of many a first-time marathoner: I fell off the wagon. After the marathon, I didn't run a single mile for two weeks. I went for a few easy runs in November and December, and I completed a half marathon (my third, and my slowest) in January, but other than that my mileage has settled between 1 and 3 miles per week, if that. I did buy a bicycle and start attending semi-regular spin classes, to prepare for riding three days of RAGBRAI* this summer, but I haven't ramped up intensity nearly to the level of my previous running training.

A friend asked me if I'd run the marathon with her this year, and I declined because I didn't want to spend four months of my life obsessing over it. I will run another marathon -- maybe even in 2014 -- but this year, I decided to work on speed. Of course, that was before my running dropped off a cliff, and right now I can't run three miles without stopping out of discomfort/weak mindedness.

So, as I begin the laborious journey once again of getting my body and my mind into race-ready shape, I turn to this blog as a way to document the process and get my thoughts on the Internet, where they belong. I wrote the Hal Higdon Intermediate Half-Marathon training program into my planner, and it actually isn't due to start for two more weeks, so I tacked on the first two weeks of the Novice 2 running program. I'll have to make a few adjustments for the long bike rides and a couple events this summer (I am not running 9 miles on the third day of Lollapalooza, nosireebob), but otherwise I plan to stick closely to the program, a feat I haven't accomplished since my first couch-to-5K in 2010. (I cheated a lot on the marathon training program last year. That shit is arduous, the summer was hot, and I'm a complainer -- but I did finish alive, so it was not for naught.)

I'm running the Chicago Half-Marathon on September 9, and I want to complete it in under 2:10:00. My best time is approx. 2:15:00, and that was in October 2011 and partially due to the fact that my friend and I were late to the race, panicked, and ran the first half incredibly fast. It was also raining/hailing, which is a really good way to motivate yourself to finish. The entire time, I was chanting in my head, "Ann Sather cinnamon rolls. Ann Sather cinnamon rolls." This strategy also helped me through miles 20-24 of the marathon. Ann Sather is a goddess.

And that, dear reader, is a look inside my training regimen and motivation. If you see me along the trail, do me a favor and start whispering, "Cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon rollsssss."

Let's do this.

*RAGBRAI is a party on wheels, once you forget the 60-90 miles of rolling Iowa plains you have to cover each day in order to claim your butter-slathered corn on the cob and rehydrating beers. This is a promise I made to my grandmother, who had knee surgery in December. I told her the day before her surgery that I'd ride RAGBRAI with her, something she's done about a dozen times, if she recovered in time. I'll be damned if she wasn't back on that bike six weeks early, giant scar and all. I will visit her and my grandfather in Texas in a few weeks, and we'll ride about 100 miles in two days -- the equivalent of the 20-miler about a month before the marathon. I'll be riding a recumbent tandem with my grandfather, and I'm psyched. Check out this post from last summer about my first ride on a recumbent.