Yesterday I got an email that prompted me to utter the words, “Holy crap, no way!” and start to panic a little.
The email was a weekly newsletter from Toronto Women’s Run Series, and the first sentence started with the phrase, “With 14 weeks to go until the Toronto Women’s half-marathon…”
WHAT? There are just 14 weeks until my next half-marathon?
Holy crap! No way!
Of course, that means that there are only ten weeks until my wedding, but that’s another freak-out for another day.
I’ve been sitting around all winter getting bronchitis and having kids in hospital and the such like, when all this time I should have been gearing up to training. To be fair to myself, I never stopped running completely this winter. I had to slow down some due to all that’s been going on, but in between illnesses, I’ve been able to get in some short but good quality speed workouts.
Actually, the speed workouts may have been my downfall. Forcing myself to maintain 4:55 minutes per kilometre when my usual speed workout pace is about 6:00 minutes per kilometre probably overtaxed my body and screwed around with my immune system.
But anyway. The point is that I’m probably not in as much trouble as my mind would have me believe.
It messes with me a lot, my mind does. But again, that’s another story for another day.
What the newsletter did do, though, was galvanize me into action. I went to a few of my favourite running websites and selected a training program to follow from now until race day. And you know, it’s not so bad. This training program is not any more difficult than previous ones I have followed in the past,and as I said, it’s not like I’m starting from zero.
For this particular race, I am aiming to break 2:15. It is an ambitious goal, since my best time since I came back to running is 2:22:38. A seven-minute improvement over a distance of 21km is quite a lot. But I think I can do it and I’m sure as hell going to try. Ultimately, I’m doing this for my son, and that is the best possible motivation.
I’ll just slow down briefly when I go through the water station staffed by shirtless firefighters.
14 weeks is a lot of time…it’s all good. You will be just fine. If you ran 2:22 that’s really great and I think 2:15 will be no problem. It’s funny how your mind can mess with you. We ran 5 miles outside yesterday for the first time in over three weeks. We have less than two weeks for the 1/2 marathon and I am hoping my knee holds up. I woke up at 2:30 in the morning with pain in my knee that I think was more in my head than anything else. Then, I couldn’t go back to sleep because I started to obsess about the training and wondering if I have done enough. I started going over timelines in my head and picking apart the training. I worried about how my body would feel when I woke up and if it would tell me I couldn’t run. I started walking around in the living room to feel if there was any pain. It was all in my head. I guess the 1/2 marathon won’t seem real unless I am at packet pick-up.
You’re so right – our minds play nasty tricks on us! You are right – 14 weeks is a good length of time considering that I’m starting from a place of pretty good fitness. Thanks for the encouragement! Take care of that knee – scale back the training if you need to and I bet you’ll do fine!