While I was in grad school I had a professor that gave us, among other fun pieces of writing to use in our classroom, a compilation entitled "What it feels like to...". It's little mini-articles written by people who have experienced all kinds of things like being shot, being bitten by a shark, being really short, being really tall and all kinds of other interesting topics.
One of them was written by a woman who was a dishwasher to put herself through college. She talks about how her job was to carry (with her bare hands) the burning hot dishes from the massive dishwasher and bring them over to her station to dry them. And she said something that has stuck with me. She said that after a few days of burning her hands on these dishes as she carried them over and over, she just accepted that it was going to hurt. When she picked up the stack of dishes out of the steaming dishwasher there was no chance that it was not going to hurt. And something about just accepting that it was going to hurt, accepting that it was going to be painful, made it easier.
That's about how I'm feeling about running this marathon right now. It's what Landon and I were talking about tonight as we were looking over the training schedule and planning out some routes in our neighborhood for this week's runs. It's going to be hard. The training is going to be hard. There's no easy way out. There's no slow enough pace that will make running 26.2 miles easy (or 9 miles of 15 miles or 20 miles, for that matter). And something about just accepting that fact, that realizing that the daily runs and the marathon are going to be hard, going to hurt, gives me a little peace of mind. I've just got to accept that and set out to do my best anyway.
This week's run was 9 miles and we both agreed that it was pretty much the hardest run we've had so far. We got up around 6am on Saturday and went out to a park by our house to run and it was hot and sunny when we started running. By 815am or so when we finished, it was already in the mid/upper-80's: HOT. At 5 miles we stopped to drink a little Gatorade that we had set out at the beginning of our run (and I tried using a gel because our marathon training site said to experiment with them--bad idea for me, in case you were wondering) and the last 4 miles, once we started running again were brutal. I had to run/walk the last 2, which I definitely didn't have to do the last time we ran 9 miles (in our pre-marathon trainings), but it was about 15 degrees cooler last time we ran this distance (and I hadn't eaten a gel that time). So I'm hoping that has something to do with why my pace was about a minute and a half slower than it was last time we ran 9 miles and about a minute slower per mile than I needed to run to meet my marathon goal of under four and a half hours.
And even though I know Landon wasn't too happy with his time either, I was SO proud of him because he was a heck of a lot closer to his goal race pace than I was. And it shouldn't be this hot in Chicago when we run our race (we're crossing our fingers that the past holds true this year!!).
So, I'm hoping next week I'll run better. And faster. Even though I know it won't be any easier. Or hurt any less.
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