Early in April I registered for the Madison (Quarter) Marathon. Then, for the next month and a half or so, I did nothing active. I don't think I ran once. Nary a crunch was crunched. Therefore, I had resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to skip this race.
Even so, I wanted to go to the expo to get my shirt and bib. I mean, I paid for them, right? So, my friend Mark and I went and I got swept up in it. The shirt was so cool, I felt horrible that I wasn't going to be able to wear it. I posted on Facebook how upset I was that I didn't train and wouldn't be able to run the race, which led to a few friends/family saying I should run it anyway; walk, if I needed to.
The problem here is that when I re-started training for my last race (early April), I got shin splints so bad I had to quit mid-run. It scared the crap out of me, to be honest. So, how could I possibly run at all (for 6.55 miles) and expect to be ok? That's why I thought I couldn't do it.
I decided to do it anyway.
Working on NO training whatsoever and about 5 hours of sleep, I geared up and headed downtown a little after 6am. My goal was to finish. I knew I'd have to walk at times and was ok with that. Just finish. I warmed-up and stretched and milled about for a while, then watched the marathoners start, then the halfers, then got in line for the quarter, which started at 7:40am. Turned on Stuff You Should Know, heard the horn, and started running.
Sure enough, before mile one was finished, my right shin was killing me. Instead of panicking or quitting, though, I just walked and stretched. I even smiled. "I knew you'd do this, shin." And I kept going. And you know what? It got better. It got stronger. It was incredible.
By the time we started, it was already in the 80s, so we were all supposed to take it easy anyway (They actually stopped the marathon at 11am for safety reasons). There was a small group of one guy and two girls that I kept up with and that worked really well. I'd watch them run ahead as I walked and then when I saw them stop, I'd run up to and past them. And vice versa. It worked great. And when we ran through the neighborhoods, there were people out with their hoses spraying us. I wanted to kiss them all on the mouth.
The other trick I did was, if I was walking, whenever I saw the next mile marker sign, I'd have to start running and not stop until I got to the sign. This only backfired once. I had just started walking when, off in the distance, I saw "Mile 5." "CRAP!" I said and laughed. And off I went.
Running down the shoot to the finish was incredible. And humbling. I finished it (in 1:25). I even got a sweet metal! Mission accomplished.
While it felt great to finish, part of me was embarrassed because I knew the effort I had put in to prepare was sub-par. I mean, there was no effort to prepare, so... Which led me to this thought: If I can finish the quarter marathon (the "1/2 1/2" as my friend Tony called it) on basically no training, why couldn't I do the half with a couple months worth of training?
Which is why I'm going to run my first half at the end of August.
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