Monday, February 21, 2011

The Reason Being....

Firstly, I would like to start off with a little song.....

Happy Day After My Birthday To ME
Happy Day After My Birthday To ME
Happy Day After My Birthday To MEEEEEEEEEEE....
I Somehow Managed to Still Eat Healthy!!!!


Hooray! What an accomplishment considering that my family took me to Red Robin (yumm) to celebrate. But I got a soup and a wrap, and I took half of the wrap home with me. Then, later that night my friends Madalyn and Chelsea cooked rice pilaf with broccoli, roasted chicken and asparagus. Even more YUMM! (They also made delicious cupcakes, but I contained myself and only had one.)

In other birthday news, I got some awesome gifts! I FINALLY got my Non-Runners Marathon Guide book I had been waiting and waiting for. Its utterly fantastic. Dawn Dais writes exactly how I think- dry sense of humor, witty, sarcastic and real. I'm already half way through the book. I also received a new set of headphones, an armband carrier for my iPod, some body bands to do my toning and strength exercises with and some gift cards. I'm actually very excited to continue my training. I know it's going to be really rough going, and I'm going to want to give up a lot, but I'm going to carry it through to the finish line in the fall.

In her book, Dawn talks about having "reasons to run"- actual, solid, justifiable reasons that you can back up for when you are laying face down in the park after running 6 miles and are trying to talk yourself out of continuing with your training. She even has a small section in the book where she encourages you to write down your reasons and what your "exhausted-on-a-bench" counter-arguments would be. I figured I would post mine here, and not just in the book.

Reasons for Running

Reason: I want to cross "finish a road race" off of my bucket list.
Counter-Argument: You have already run a 5k, so why do you need to run another race to complete this bucket list item?

Reason: I want to be healthy and lose weight.
Counter-Argument: And I want to walk on the moon. Doesn't mean I'm going to strap myself to a rocket and let her rip!

Reason: It is something I enjoy talking about and doing with my friends.
Counter-Argument: So is going out to dinner... and that doesn't make you sore afterward.

Reason: I want to be able to raise money for a worthy cause (which I plan on doing, if possible, for the half-marathon)
Counter-Argument: You could always just send in a check.


Isn't that fun? I could go on all night. Anyway, all of my reasons are valid and justifiable, if only to myself (and really, that's what matters in the end), so I feel good about this.

I've also come up with my own training schedule (based off of the one in the book and others that friends have followed, etc.) It provides me with two rest days for the first 3 months and then after that I will have 5 months where I only rest one day a week (my second rest day will morph into a second cross-training/circuit-training day). I will be running based on minutes, as opposed to miles, for the bulk of this training, and as I get closer to race day I will focus more on mileage.

Race Day : October 15th, 2011.
T-Minus 239 days.... and counting!

1 comment:

Andrew Opala said...

Happy Day after your Birthday to you!

That's a very long goal! Good luck on the journey. I hope you let us all follow along and learn!