Half-Way Today

This morn­ing I ran 13.1 miles with the marathon train­ing team. That is, to date, the fur­thest I have ever run at one time. I had pre­vi­ous­ly, on my own, ran about 12 1/2 miles at one time. Near­ly there, right? Well, not quite. That was about a year ago, and I ran that far with­out build­ing up to the dis­tance, with­out car­ry­ing any water, and with no real idea of what I was capa­ble of. Since then, I’ve learned a great deal about dis­tance run­ning as well as myself.

First of all, I was being not only harsh on myself for going over two hours that day with­out water, I was being down­right fool­ish. That lev­el of excre­tion results in a large amount of water loss. My body def­i­nite­ly felt the pain from dehy­dra­tion after­wards. Fur­ther, jump­ing from rough­ly 9 miles to over 12 is a fair­ly dra­mat­ic leap in terms of train­ing dis­tance, and espe­cial­ly when I was­n’t stick­ing to any real sched­ule. I sup­pose it’s some­thing to have accom­plished that on my own, but going fur­ther with­out any guid­ance could have had me caus­ing more harm than good.

Fast for­ward to today, after I’ve been build­ing up on the aver­age of a mile fur­ther each week and I’ve been edu­cat­ed a lot more in some of the schools of thought on dis­tance run­ning. I’ve learned more about the rate that my body needs flu­ids (on a much more fine­ly tuned lev­el than with my back­pack­ing expe­ri­ences), I’ve learned the kinds of tech­niques over the course of train­ing that will con­di­tion me to be able to per­form over hours of run­ning. I’ve learned a lot more about how to push myself and when to let off.

I believe that each of us has a lot more inside than we real­ize. Attempt­ing a marathon is my (and Ange­la’s) exper­i­ment in fig­ur­ing out what I’m capa­ble of. How­ev­er, it isn’t a mat­ter of tak­ing off one day and forc­ing myself to do that kind of dis­tance. It is about learn­ing how to get more out of me. That takes time in train­ing and time in learn­ing. In the end, it just takes time. It’s time well spent, though. 

Angela tells me it’s time to head off to Chipo­tle for our post-run bur­ri­to (it helps to have goals). Before I go, I just want to tip my hat to every­one I know who has also worked to find their capa­bil­i­ties: Dave in his run­ning, my Dad in hik­ing Philmont, my Mom in writ­ing a hik­ing guide, and Dal­las Smith in just plain run­ning fur­ther than any human should. You guys inspire Angela and myself and you make this seem so easy.