Taking A Minute

I ran my second half marathon this weekend. I’m already looking for another one. I feel like an asshole for saying it but I am officially addicted to running. People always say this will happen eventually if you stick to running but I always thought they were full of shit. Nope. It has happened to me.

The run went really really well, although my time (2 hours and eight minutes) was exactly the same as my first half marathon time. Weird. I was bummed that I wasn’t faster, but I felt MUCH better both during and after this race. So even though I didn’t improve my time, I have obviously improved my conditioning. Next time I’ll work on my speed, and my confidence. Before this race I was terrified that I wasn’t going to be able to finish because I had to spend so much of the winter training on the treadmill, and so I didn’t have as much confidence in myself as I should have had going into it.

I should have started farther forward, in a faster pace group, because I spent the whole race trying to pass people who were running waaaay slower than I was, and I am NOT a fast runner. I think that really slowed me down, especially in the all the parts where there wasn’t enough room to pass and you just had to run slow.

More than anything, it was a ton of fun. I’d run another one next weekend, if I could! The only thing I really hated was the carb loading. It stressed me out to no end to have to eat things that I feared would make me gain weight.

My next goals are to lose my last ten pounds of fluff and become a lean mean running machine, to increase my hill and hot weather running stamina, and to run another half marathon in September. But more than anything I’d like to increase my confidence. I’d like to work on that little voice in my head that tells me I can’t do it, that I’m too slow, that I’ll probably look fat in my running pictures, that everyone else is faster than me, that I trained so much and it didn’t make any difference, that I get too nervous, that I’m not good enough. I want to turn that voice into a confident, loving, encouraging, proud of me voice, that tells me that I can do whatever I set my mind to.

I doubt myself so much. I’m always looking to the future, trying to improve, trying to get to perfect (even though I’m staring to suspect there’s no such thing). But I just ran 13.1 miles, and I am someone who two years ago couldn’t run for one minute. I remember running for five miles and being stunned at that number. I remember thinking I could never run ten miles. But then I did it and I moved on and those things seemed not as impressive, because well, if I’VE done them, then how hard can they really be?

The reality is that anyone can run ten miles, anyone can run a half marathon. But anyone didn’t. I DID. And I am going to take a minute to be proud.