Running
Saturday, April 2nd, 2005I’m signed up for the Cherry Blossom 10 miler tomorrow morning; unless it’s pouring rain when my alarm goes off, I’m going to run it. I’m undertrained, but I’ll set my watch for a 4 minute run — 1 minute walk cycle, and I should be able to finish it.
As a child, and through college, I was about as unathletic as you could get. I walked a lot, as do most New Yorkers, but it was a major accomplishment for me to run a mile for gym in high school. (The next year, I managed to sign up for ballroom dancing as my gym class.)
But in 1996, I took up running, and within a few months I got it into my head that I wanted to run a marathon. Much to my surprise, I turned out to be not bad at distance running. I ran 3 marathons between 1997 and 1999, finishing 2 of them in under 4 hours.
I haven’t run very much since I got pregnant with D. I read all these books about how it’s perfectly safe to run while pregnant. I think I even read that Joan Samuelson ran 5 miles the day before she gave birth. But it turned out that running while pregnant was really uncomfortable for me, so I didn’t. And since the boys were born, I haven’t been willing to carve out the time to do serious training.
Unfortunately, I seem to be really bad at running in moderation. For my health, 30-40 minutes four times a week would be great. But without the incentive of a target race, and the structure of a training schedule, it’s just too easy for me to blow off runs when the weather isn’t perfect, or I’m tired, or busy.
At packet pickup today, I found myself eyeing the race brochures for the fall marathons. I’d really like to take a shot at qualifying for Boston someday. But I don’t know how I’d fit it into my life. It’s not just the time that the actual runs take; it’s the idea of trying to keep up with the boys all day after having done a long run in the morning.