I’m glad you’re here.  Put your feet up.  This might take awhile.  I want to share with you my marathon journey. It had started what now seems ages ago.  But first let me interrupt myself to say I’m not a runner.  I never was a runner.  I have no previous competitive running experience.  I never aspired to be a runner.  And I certainly never played a runner in a major motion picture.  But at some point between last February and right now, I became one.  Better yet, I became a marathoner.  I am a first-time marathoner.  Welcome to my adventure!

I was bored.  Amazingly this is how most of my adventures start.  Then I heard my friend talk of how she had started to train for a marathon last year but was sidelined due to injury.  It made me wonder if I could run a marathon.  It would certainly fill some time.  More than that, I wanted to say I was in training for a marathon.  I wanted to see if it could do it.  I wanted some way to get into shape and not realize it.  I wanted a long-term goal and a bunch of short-term goals to make it feel as if I was accomplishing something.  I wanted an activity where my only competition was on the inside.  I wanted an excuse to buy new shoes.

I was never sure I could do it in the first couple weeks of ‘pre-training’.  I used the pre-training as a tool to get my body ready for the trauma of training for a marathon.  The marathon wasn’t my biggest obstacle.  The marathon would be easy.  It was the training that would make or break my efforts.

As the pre-training got harder, the bigger my doubts became.  I told only family and close friends about my goals so as not to feel like a complete failure if I never made it to the marathon.  I started having problems with running for 15 minutes.  How was I going to run for hours?  I became sure I could never complete the pre-training phase.  Let alone put all the mileage together for training and then for 26.2 foot-pounding-muscle-aching-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-this-is-gonna-kill-me-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into-why-did-I-ever-think-this-was-a-good-idea-heart-pumping-arm-swinging miles.

I’m happy to report much has changed since the beginning of this ordeal and I want to share with you the results of my determination.  Every week I hope to give you a glimpse into my running world.  I will try to explain things I have thought, learned and experienced while exploring my limits and working towards what at this moment seems unreachable.

At some point between last February and right now, I became a runner.  Better yet, I became a first-time marathoner.  No.  I am a first-time marathoner.  Welcome to my adventure!

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Continue reading - Week One