I hate to admit when I’m wrong about something. Who doesn’t? I really hate it, though, if I’ve made some grand gesture about my original idea in the first place. Like, say….writing a blog and declaring that I’m going to run a marathon this year and how great it’s gonna be and how, of course, I can do it.
Yeah.
What the hell was I thinking?
The truth is that I probably could do it if I didn’t have a few strikes against me right now. I have two girls who need me. Of course they do. I’m their momma. But, one of my girls seems to need me at all hours of the night. STRIKE ONE! Yes – my baby girl, nine months old now, has decided that sleep is not really her thing. So, every two to three hours each night, I’m up trying to figure out how to get this baby to enjoy sleep the way the rest of us in the house do. It’s not working. Have you ever tried running five or six or eight miles on two or three hours of sleep? It ain’t easy.
As a military wife, I enjoy a lot of the perks of my husband’s career. This career, though, frequently takes him away from us. STRIKE TWO! This means, that he’s sometimes away on the Saturdays or Sundays when I need him to be taking care of the girls so I can get my “long run” done for the week. If I don’t get the long run in, I’m not doing what I need to do to be able to run the distance.
STRIKE THREE! Mommy guilt – we’ve talked about this before. As it is now, when my husband is home, my long runs on the weekends are taking close to two hours. I ran nine miles yesterday in a little over an hour and a half. That’s a lot of time running. My mid-week runs are now at their longest, so they are only five miles. During the week, I take the girls to the Childwatch at the Y. Any way you shake it out, it’s a lot of time that I’m away from them each week. The more I thought about it, I realized that I would have to at least double my time each week if I continue on after my half marathon to the full marathon training. That’s up towards four hours on the weekends, people! I just don’t think I want to commit that kind of time to this right now.
So, this is my plan – I’m going to keep training for my half marathon. I’m almost there! The Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon is on May 1! I’m excited and glad to be running it again this year. I have no goals in terms of a finish time. My goal is to finish! After that, I may do a boot camp or something like that, but my running will be purely recreational – with mileage and pace that is my own and not dependent on some kind of a “plan”.
Recreational – Wow!
Who ever thought I would say that?
