Day 1

I am training for a half-marathon, my first half-marathon. I will document my progress on this blog as a bright, shining, public way to stay honest. This is important because I don't think this training is going to be easy for me, often times I let life get in the way of exercise and training, but with an endurance feat such as this every step you take is built up of all the steps that have come before it. What I'm trying to say is that without training, I will fail. Failing is not an option, because as you will come to learn I'm very competitive when it comes to things like this. Especially competitive with myself. But then again, I think all runners are.

I've thought a lot about the reasons for why I want to do this and have come up with a few:

1) My friend also wanted to do it and that push was a good impetus for starting all of this

2) One of my life goals is to run a marathon, so this is a good place to start

3) Life after undergrad is somewhat...unfulfilling in ways that I was not expecting, so to inject some inspiration/purpose into my life I'm going to challenge myself physically

4) I'll be healthier, it's always been a goal of mine to be physically fit. After losing some of the weight I gained from living in the German Haus last year (and eating all of those desserts), I will be able to lose the rest and gain muscle mass ! When I feel healthy and look good I'm more confident. Statement of the human condition?

So I'm following a plan that allows for 3 days of running a week over 10 weeks (although I have longer than that since I'm aiming for February 2012). The workouts consist of a speed workout with short intervals, a tempo run and an endurance run.

Here is this week:

Speed: 20 min warm up, 4 x 400, 10 minute warm down (Mon)

Tempo: 4 mile run (Wed)

Endurance: 5 mile (Sat)

Yesterday I did the speed run and it was great! I felt wonderful afterward, but then I realized that I had miscalculated the timing for the 400s by running an 8:34 mile pace instead of a 7:58 mile pace.... whoopsies. No wonder it was so easy...haha. It's ok I still have time! And if anything the 4.5 miles was just good for the legs. And if I keep feeling great after workouts I'll be even more inspired.

Tonight is weight training, which left me practically unable to walk last week, hopefully I'll be a little stronger this week since we only did like 500 billion squats. bring it on weight training class, bring it on.

Yesterdays run was topped off by a lovely piece of strawberry rhubarb pie and pumpkin ice cream... all sans guilt :)

Next update coming soon...