Back In The Saddle (Sore)

Angela con­vinced me that we absolute­ly need­ed to do the marathon train­ing team again this year. It would be dif­fi­cult for me to put down in one post just how much we learned doing this last year. In short, we went from peo­ple who go jog­ging occa­sion­al­ly to run­ners. Here would be my top list of things I took away from last year:

  • Good equip­ment (cloth­ing, shoes, GPS, hydra­tion, etc.) won’t make you a good run­ner, but bad equip­ment will make you a mis­er­able runner.
  • Train­ing is a nev­er-end­ing process. Train­ing nev­er ends after one race, it just peaks and then ramps down between races.
  • Men­tal con­di­tion­ing real­ly is that impor­tant. Your mind will make you stop long before your body will.
  • You have to pay atten­tion to what you’re eat­ing. You can’t eat too few or too many calo­ries; you have to find the right balance.

That only scratch­es the sur­face, but there some of the key things I’m try­ing to keep in mind going into my sec­ond marathon. We’re signed up to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Wash­ing­ton D.C. / Arling­ton, VA at the end of Octo­ber. We want­ed to have a change of scenery this year and give a sort of test run to the idea of run­ning vaca­tions. Angela and I had talked about doing marathons in oth­er cities or even oth­er coun­tries, and then just a cou­ple of weeks ago I read an arti­cle in the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor about how that same thing is get­ting to be very pop­u­lar1 Any­way, it seems like a great way to see more of a new city and meet some of the local peo­ple. Of course, Angela will tell you that I’ll stop every 100 yards to take a pho­to and be worth­less as a result.

By join­ing the train­ing team, we are also signed up to run the Rich­mond Marathon as well2. It’s only 12 days after the Marine Corp, so you’ll have to ask me lat­er if I’m going to run it for sure. Right now, I’m plan­ning on it, but there’s real­ly no way to pre­dict how I’ll be doing then.

Also, I’ve signed up for a free account at WeEndure.com, which is a handy way for me to log all my miles online. I’ll try and keep it going dur­ing the whole train­ing. I’ll also add all the races on there for any­one inter­est­ed. If you’re think­ing about vis­it­ing us some­time, why not mak­ing it a run­ning vacation?

  1. One of my new things on my life-to-do list is vis­it Antarc­ti­ca and run a marathon there. A train­ing team coach of mine did that last year and became the youngest women to run a marathon on all sev­en con­ti­nents in one year. []
  2. It’s includ­ed in the fee for the team. After you sub­tract out the $65 marathon reg­is­tra­tion, the $15 for the team col­or t‑shirt, and $20 for your marathon rac­ing sin­glet, the train­ing team only costs $30. That means that you get six months of run­ning advice, access to phys­i­cal ther­a­pists (new this year), free clin­ics, snacks and ener­gy gels, and more. I mean, I used $30 in ener­gy gels alone last year. Seri­ous­ly, it’s one of the coolest things in Rich­mond. []
Published
Categorized as Running

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

3 comments

  1. Way to go! There is NOTHING bet­ter than join­ing a train­ing pro­gram when you’re want­i­ng to achieve change. I ride a bike with a long-time friend, and we go out most days into the emp­ty coun­try roads on the edge of this beau­ti­ful city of Christchurch. In fact today I cycled my 5,000th kilo­me­ter since April. Would­n’t have man­aged that with­out my friend’s com­pa­ny, I think. This is where a good cor­po­rate team­build­ing pro­gram should posi­tion us. I mean, a lot of them them do train­ing and intro­duce us to new ven­tures, or expe­ri­ence ‘zones’, but then the pro­gram is over…and what do we do. Noth­ing. We slip back to what we WERE doing before the team­build­ing. Well, I’m think­ing a good team build­ing pro­gram should include some kind of on-going train­ing or exer­cis­es or work­shops, so we can retain the ben­e­fits after the event. Any­way, I’m ram­bling a bit off top­ic here…Good luck for your next marathon!

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *