On Sunday, January 18th I ran and finished my very first marathon… that’s 26.2 miles of running. Actually, my Garmin watch tracked me at 26.41 miles! I have to admit that this marathon was the hardest thing I have ever done. I thought natural childbirth was tough, but this made it feel like a piece of cake! Maybe I am being a little dramatic right now because the marathon is so fresh on my mind and my legs are still sore – 4 days later. When I started writing this post it was starting to get really long so I am going to break this post into two. This first post will be about my 4.5 months of training and the next one will be about my race weekend and the actual race, itself.
I signed up for the Chevron Houston Marathon in May 2014. I feel so blessed that I was able to start training for the Chevron Houston Marathon in September 2014 with a very good friend of mine and neighbor, Nina. Without her and a few other awesome Momma runners in Weslaco I don’t think I would have signed up for or ran this race. I have been running a few half marathons every year for the past 6 years and they were starting to get a little comfortable so I felt like it was time to step up my game and attempt a full marathon. I had deferred my January 2014 half marathon race due to a bad case of runners knee so I was able to get into the 2015 race using my deferment and having a qualifying time with a past half marathon race time. I also, decided to go for the whole 26.2 because I figured there was no better time then now. I wasn’t nursing any babies, I was semi getting to sleep all night long, I wasn’t planning on getting pregnant, so why not sign up!? I was determined to check running a FULL marathon off of my bucket list, that exists only in my head. Luckily, Nina has a few marathons under her belt so I just did whatever she told me. She brought me pages of different training schedules and told me to buy a hand held water bottle and off we went. At this point I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Training for half marathons was a piece of cake compared to this.
The text messages between us would start in the early to late evening about who was running and what time we were meeting the next morning. We would all get up to run at 5am or 5:30am during the weekdays and on the weekends we would get up at 6am or 6:30am. I had to get used to getting up that early. My kids had always been my alarm clock. They wouldn’t wake me up until after 7am so 5am sounded HORRIBLE, but when else was I going to find the time to run? The rest of my day was spent taking care of my kids & hubby, cooking, cleaning and keeping everyone entertained and happy. I am pretty sure the girls were sick of me complaining about getting up early and/or sending crying imoji faces because I hated getting up that early. But truthfully, I began to like the early morning runs, once I was up and running and with my friends. After I was home from a run I had the rest of the day to spend with my kids and hubby, that is if I could stay awake past 8pm. Sometimes if I was lucky the kids would still be asleep and I couple drink my morning coffee in peace and quiet… those were GREAT days!
During the weekdays we would run anywhere from 6-8 miles around Weslaco all lit up with our flashing lights. Sometimes I wonder if we should even wear those flashing lights because I think the cars see our pretty red lights and swerve closer to us. Every Wednesday we would meet at Nina’s house to do our “speed” workouts around our neighborhood running 800’s. Thank heaven she lives .2 miles from my house. I always had a love/hate relationship with Wednesdays speed work. My most favorite Wednesday morning was when Nina talked me into showing up because she had invited a friend of hers that had been giving her coaching tips. He made us run 15 400’s! OMG! That was a tough morning and I wished I was still in bed. On Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays we would do our long runs. Some of the girls had been doing these early morning runs for a while (years maybe) so they had already told the 2 Whataburgers in Weslaco that we would sometimes stop in in the mornings during our runs and they would give us a small cup for ice water. It’s amazing at the amount of elderly men we would see at Whataburger at 5:30am! I think they thought we were all nuts. Some would ask us if we were training for any thing in particular and proceed to tell us that they had ran a marathon here or there. One of my favorite early morning runs was when we came across a snake by Weslaco High School. I saw it first and thought to myself, “no way! That is not a snake right here!” As we got closer to it I realized it was dead and just yelled to the girls to watch out for the dead snake and Nina screamed bloody murder. Then she made me run back and take a picture of it. Nina is a hilarious running buddy because she is so jumpy! Every time a dog would bark or we would come across a strange person out at 5am or one of us would bump her from behind she would scream! We always had a good laugh at her.
Every week the milage increased and I trudged along, happy as can be that I had friends pushing me along. November and December were tough months of training because the mileage got longer and the holidays were coming, but I still had to be a Mommy and a wife. And the Christmas shopping and decorating had to get done and Holiday parties had to be attended. I am pretty sure 5 out of 7 nights of the week I was ready to go to bed before my kids. There were nights when glasses of wine got passed up, the dishes didn’t get done and clothes stayed in the dryer for 3 cycles because I was so tired and I was just trying my hardest to keep the kids, hubby and house together and happy! We also ran in the Harlingen Half Marathon in November and the McAllen Half Marathon in December.
January snuck up on me super quick and before I knew it we were in tapper mode on the training schedule. It was so weird to only go out and run less than 8, 7, 6, 5 miles. I was hoping all my hard work was not going down the drain while I tried to rest my legs for race day. The week of the race came and I was so nervous and anxious. I would get waves of anxiety about running the race at a pace I should have been able to do according to my half marathon times. But once I decided I was going to have to slow myself down a little and run at a comfortable pace so I could finish the race, my anxiety went away.
Training for a full marathon was like a full-time job. I thought about the training all day and all night. Wondering if I was doing enough and praying I wouldn’t get injured and if I would be able to actually finish the race and get past the mile 20 wall. Somedays I hated it and struggled and somedays I loved it. If it weren’t for Nina and my other running buddies, I know I would not have made it through the whole training and I would have just ended up running another half marathon. I am looking forward to many more early morning runs with these gals and maybe one day I’ll sign up and run another full marathon because I guess I am just that crazy!
