Marathon

I have a marathon to run in early November.   I’m not trained for it.   I think I can get trained for it but it’s going to take a lot of running—running I’m not sure I’m committed to really doing.    It’s not so much distance, but frequency and distance.   Short runs, medium runs and long runs.    The last two marathons I ran I was able to do them, but I slowed down fairly dramatically after about eighteen miles.   Meaning I wasn’t really trained beyond the eighteen miles.

I think I need to do some speed training too.   Typically my running buddy and I run and talk at the same time.   We can easily run a whole marathon, never stopping talking all the while.   This makes the marathon distance go by more quickly and we have a lot of fun talking (she’s my best friend), but it means we’re not really pushing ourselves for speed.

I ran ten miles a few days ago without much issue.   I wasn’t sore the next day and I wasn’t tired at the end of the ten miles, but ten miles isn’t even close to 26.2 miles, isn’t even half-way there.   I know the signs of when I’m getting to the edge of my trained distance and it’s clearly beyond ten miles.   But those ten miles weren’t particularly fast either.

We’ve been talking about doing shorter distances and working on speed but so far we just keep dropping into the same habit of, “what marathon should we do next?”   So I’ll see in the next few weeks if I’m really ready for a marathon in November.    If not, I might get kicked out towards the latter half of the race for being beyond the cutoff time.    That’s never happened so far, but I can see it being a possibility if I don’t get serious about the running soon.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is starting to care about reading things.   He reads in school, but he’s not particularly interested in what he’s reading.   Then sometimes, like related to Minecraft or in the case of a random sign he saw the other day, he wants to know what something says.    Tonight he wanted to search for something on Netflix.   I wouldn’t do it for him but I told him I’d help if he sounded it out and looked for the letters on the screen.   He was happy when he figured out how to find Power Rangers by himself.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter bashed her head tonight and got one of those heavy bleeding cuts to the scalp.   It wasn’t related to anything blind, just her not paying attention and falling into the dresser knob while she wobbled around on the floor.   It took us a while to find out how bad the cut was because she was wanting to alternate between the ice pack and touching it herself.    After it had stopped bleeding she and I were working on reading braille.   She would feel the cut from time to time (and then get residual blood on her braille alphabet cards) and say in a quiet voice, “oh, that’s not good.”