1000 Miles

"We are different, in essence, from other men. If you want to win something, run 100 meters. If you want to experience something, run a marathon." -Emil Zatopek

I have passed 1000 miles so far in my running journey. As the crow flies from Portland Oregon, I’d be approaching Wisconsin about now. I started my training on the evil date of 6/6/6, about 9 ½ months ago. My first week was 2 miles every other day on a treadmill while my son was taking swimming lessons. That seems so long ago now. I calculate I have spent at least 154 hours running so far. The shear amount of time and dedication that goes into marathon training is tremendous. I wonder if I would have known then, what I do now… would I have ever started this journey? I like to believe I would have… because in the end… it IS worth it. Yes it is more work than I thought it would be, but yes I still think it is worth it.

Last night I dreamt about running a marathon. It was, of course, a very strange dream. Running dreams are not that unusual to me. In high school (and even after) I used to have a reoccurring dream where I was running laps around the inside of the school… past the classrooms and lockers endlessly… around and around and around. As far as dreams go… it wasn’t exactly one of those exciting ones, but it is strange to look back now and remember I was always dreaming about running.

In the dream last night I can remember waking up before the race and drinking water, and worrying that I hadn’t drank enough in the preceding days to prepare. I mean… of course not… I had no idea that I’d go to sleep and find myself on the morning of my marathon. =) Anyway… things got very strange from there. I showed up to the starting line a bit late… and there were a lot of my friends there too. I am not really sure why they were going to try to run a marathon… but there they were. I can remember searching for a pace marker… and the first one I saw was 9:15. Too slow I thought… and surged through the crowd looking for 8:45.

When I finally did, it was way too near the front of the race. I remember telling someone the good runners must have started from somewhere else… or early. I also remember that for some reason the marathon was in New York, not Eugene. After the race started… I remember discovering I have my nice leather jacket on. (Obviously not something I should be running in) I knew I couldn’t run the whole race with it on, so I looked for a place to ditch it… but it was expensive, so I was in a bit of a quandary there. In the next phase there was a great deal of confusion about where the actual course was. I can remember we were trying to follow a blue line on the road. Eventually we followed the blue line to a huge park where the whole park was blue. Apparently it was the blue paint dumping ground for the world. Another time there were so many blues lines crossing every which way, we couldn’t tell which way to run. The race ended abruptly when I realized my alarm clock didn’t go off in the real world… and I was going to be late to work. Joy.

My long runs (over 10 miles) so far have been:

09/24/06 13.1

10/15/06 10

11/12/06 12

11/25/06 14

12/03/06 16

12/17/06 18

01/07/07 12

01/21/07 14

01/28/07 16

02/04/07 18

02/17/07 20

03/11/07 21

03/18/07 14

I have just one more really long run (22-23 miles) in two weeks, and then 12,14,10 during my taper. I am almost there!