196 miles is roughly the distance between my home in Hollywood, FL and my home in Key West. It is the distance between Baltimore, MD and New York City. 196 miles is over 1 million feet. A million. It is also the distance that I have run thus far in my half-marathon training. After nearly forty three hours of running, it is somewhat surprising that I am still standing. I am now at the point in the training affectionately known (by people that know these things) as “the taper”. This is the
part where I admit that I am ready for the big race. I am ready. There, I said it. I have a few more short runs – 6 miles, 3 miles and then an easy 2 miles before next Saturday. It has been a long road (196 miles, in fact) and clearly somewhere along that road I have become a bit delusional. At no point in my pre-marathon life would I have referred to a 6 mile run as “short” and now, it seems rather glorious.
There are a lot of things that I have been doing lately that are completely out of character for me: I have been getting up at 4:15 AM for my Saturday morning trainings. No, that is not a typo. I haven’t even been complaining about it too much, but I have been napping on Saturday afternoons. I have been eating a boatload of carbs. OK, so that part is not so out of character.
On the other hand, there are things that I should have been doing for the past three months that I have clearly ignored: Wine. I should have “tapered” the consumption. Instead, in my marathon training life, I had three glasses the night before my 13.7 mile run (at 5AM, note the 4:15AM wake up time). In all fairness, I did intend to have one glass, but James at Azur brought over several new wines that we just had to try. So I did. I should be eating less fat and more protein. Yet, in the past two weeks I think I have had more French fries than I have had cumulatively in my entire life. Hey, they are carbs, right?
I know people that have given up alcohol completely for a month or two before their race. That would be all well and good if my race was in, say, July, not immediately following the Season of Eating and Drinking (which should be the new name for the month of December, by the way).
I have gone through this entire training process thinking that I can live my life exactly the same as it has been, just add some running. So far it has worked for me, but I think that when I get serious about my first full marathon (in New York, 2011) I should probably curb the fries and wine, at least for a little while. We’ll see.
Stay tuned the week of January 10th for updates and a recap of the race, as well as what wines I am drinking the night following the race. I imagine there will be more than one.
