Week Five - Wall

Mileage (miles per workout): 3 - 5 - 3 - 10

Physically the course was a piece of cake.  Mentally I couldn’t lift the fork.  The rhythm, the pace, the internal encouragement.  Twice this week my mental game never made it to the track.  Add to that missing one of my shorter runs and I pretty much felt like a failure.

I could blame a lot of things.  Stress from things unrelated to running, painful blisters that never seem to heal, nagging joint pain following me everywhere, bugs getting under the contact lens in my eye, trying a new route and not expecting the large hills.  The list could go on and on.  I wanted to blame all these things.  I hit a concrete wall going 50 miles per hour.

I tried to focus on running.  There were things to work out.  My breathing was erratic; my pace never seemed to settle into that comfort zone; my internal encouragement stayed home.  I used all the internal and external mental techniques suggested to me by my running friends.  None of them seemed to work.  I just gave up.

I even got angry.  “Why did I want to do this anyway?  What did I have to prove?  Why does everything have to be so hard?” I screamed.  No one I told was disappointed I had not run my full mileage.  But I was disappointed in myself and that was what I hated the most.  I gave something my focus and dedication for almost three months and I felt I had nothing to show for it.  There was no accomplishment only a set of slightly smelly worn out dirty shoes.

If I were to stop now all I could say was I had trained for a marathon for a while when I turned 23 but came to the hard part and bailed.  Would this be what it was going to be like my entire life?  Would I bail when things got the least bit tough?  I didn’t like that image of myself.  I didn’t want to have regrets.  Running a marathon was added to my “things to do before I die” list so long ago, I don’t remember the age I was when I wrote it.

My anger quickly became sorrow because the thing I wanted most was to have my mom see me run.  I lost my mother four years ago to cancer so physically that couldn’t happen.  She was always my biggest fan and reminded me I could do anything I wanted if I worked hard enough.  I realized I was running this marathon as much for her as I was for me.  I could accomplish this for the both of us because she would be running beside me the entire way.

Things I learned this week:

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