Whew, this post is going to be a roller coaster, so you'll have to bear with me haha. I promise this blog post will end well, but it just won't start well.
My entire running experience started way back in Germany. I was about ten and had a nightmare of a time sleeping (sleeping metaphor while talking about sleeping). Like, I would go to bed at eight and not fall asleep until around midnight. I would start panicking about sleeping after an hour of laying awake in bed and would work myself up until I didn't fall asleep. To this day, I still calculate how many hours of sleep I can get if I go to bed at a particular time and plan to wake up at a given hour the next day. I also remember waking Mark us so I wasn't the only one staying awake, because Mark had zero problems sleeping (nothing has changed there!)
My mom decided that if I were to get enough exercise during the day, I would sleep better at night. So I remember one day she took us out running with her. At first it seemed fun, like we were just going out together for a quick jog or something. After twenty minutes of still running away from the house, I started to realize that this was no longer some game. It REALLY became not a fun game when she told Mark and me to go out running on our own the next day and to run the same path we had run the day before.
Thus began a daily routine. We would get home from school and know that at some point we would have to go running that afternoon. The daily length was three miles, usually along this farm path behind our house that went up a huge hill, past this pond filled with tadpoles in the summer (appropriately named Tadpole Lake by us), then run to a bench that was a ways further along the road. To this day I bet that I could describe every turn of that run, because I know it so well. Alternatively, we could run around the block six times. Only after we did our running could we play video games or watch TV for the allotted hour and a half.
I hated running. Literally, LOATHED running with every fiber of my being. Even now, at a point in my life where I actually enjoy running (more on that later), I still get this sense of rage and hatred towards those three miles and what they were for me. I don't even know why I felt that way, because I knew it wasn't that far or that big a deal, but I hated it so much. I dreaded when my dad would come home from work, because his first or second question from him was always: "Did you do your running?" And the answer was always either "yes", with defiance or sullenness because I hated it, or "no," which meant he would either make us go run it or an argument would ensue.
A byproduct of this was that I always wanted to get out of it. Sometimes it was through pure substitution. When Mark and I did swim team, we didn't have to run because we were swimming for several hours. Since I enjoyed swimming, this was obviously a better alternative. Others were less honest means. The most famous time is when Mark got caught hiding in a tree, trying to hide out for the usual amount of time it takes to run three miles. We also figured out that walking to the pond took about the same amount of time as it would take to run to the bench. The most honest way was probably just deciding that we would not watch TV that day instead of going running. However, that one didn't usually work because the whole point was to go running, not to stop us from watching TV.
Funny thing is, looking back on it, I was going about running all wrong. I distinctly remember going out running in the rain with a heavy winter coat, jeans, and clogs. Who does that? It never occurred to me to change because then it might be more enjoyable than all these clothes making me super hot and uncomfortable.
This continued through our entire time in Germany. When we moved to Pennsylvania, we sort of did running around the neighborhood, but it was never really the same, or at least I don't remember it being the same. Maybe it was because we were now busy with other stuff that there wasn't time for running, or we didn't get home until 4:30 or 5:00 anyways given how late school got out in comparison to German schools, but I don't remember running much in Pennsylvania. I do remember hating it when I did run, except when I could run in gym class with some friends. That was always better than doing it alone or during free time after school. It was a complicated relationship, to say the least.
One important point about all of this running that I grudgingly recognized, even when I didn't want to do it: I was pretty good at it. I was never going to be super fast because that wasn't how I approached running. Since I always ran with the goal of finishing 3 miles, but not necessarily quickly (a 45 minute walk to do it was just fine with me instead of the 30 minute run), I never ran with the thought of pushing myself to finish faster. That being said, I could always run for a longer time than most of the people I knew growing up. I was comfortable running long distances, and that never really changed, even when I wasn't running on a regular basis. This became important (especially last week in the marathon), but it was present the entire time.
My running habits didn't really change for me my freshman year. I would say that I was going to run with my roommates, then I ended up not doing it after all. I still didn't think of running as an enjoyable experience and was pretty determined to never seriously run in my life again. I knew I could run a 5K or something if I wanted to on a whim, but I didn't want to do it for exercise. Whenever I would start running on my own I would think: "Why am I doing this? I hate this," and would stop after a mile or so, so too early to really get any physical exercise out of it. My mental blocks from hating running were definitely still up.
On my mission, we were encouraged to take a half hour every morning to exercise. If you're going to get 19-21 year old boys out of bed at 6:30 AM, then you need to make sure that they don't fall back asleep. Getting their blood flowing and endorphins pumping is certainly a good way to do that! And this is the point where I started to let me feelings towards running start to thaw. Five years after Germany, I realized that although I wasn't super fast, I was still decent at this. The high point came when Aaron Fletcher was my companion in Szczecin. He and I had some really hard times doing missionary work, but we would go out in the mornings and run two miles together. He was a cross country runner at BYU before his mission, so he appreciated someone who was at least willing to go out and give him the chance to run. I was grateful for someone who was willing to be patient with me while I was running and tried to make it fun. I don't remember ever getting out of bed all six days we could run to go running, but I know we went running more often than not, and I definitely got faster over the nine weeks we were together. He motivated me to think about running after my mission and pushed me to try and run during the rest of my mission. I attribute a lot of my change in perspective to him, because he made running enjoyable to me for the first time ever.
That being said, it was hard to get other companions to run with me after he and I split up and I was never motivated enough to get myself out of the door every day. I went running a couple of times a transfer after that and still felt happy about running, but I was never as serious about it as I was with Elder Fletcher. That being said, my experience with him changed my perspective. I felt happy about the prospect of running after my mission and set a goal to run the Baltimore marathon the October after my mission. I figured that even if I couldn't run while on my mission, I could start doing it after I got home.
I got home in July and the marathon was in October. I found a cheap running app (seriously, I don't know what it was doing) that told me I needed to run two to three times a week to get ready for the marathon. So I started out doing what it told me. I remember running a six-mile run a couple of days after I got home, then running a ten-mile run. I was at Interlochen with my family, and I remember surprising everyone that I was willing to just go out and run ten miles. Me, the kid who hated running with a passion? Running? It didn't seem like this would last very long.
It ended up not lasting very long, but not for the reasons you would think. Something you have to understand was that I came home from my mission pretty malnourished. I had fed myself for two years in Poland, which meant that my lunches often consisted of bread, some deli meat, fruit, and a huge chocolate bar. Dinner was pasta with a red or white sauce. Not exactly the best diet for someone walking upwards of ten miles a day. So I weighed 165 pounds when I came home and it wasn't a good kind of skinny. With all of the walking stress that I had put on my legs during my mission, added to some long runs for which I hadn't really trained, something was bound to break. I tore my meniscus a week and a half after my mission, but kept trying to run on it through the next couple of months. I would hit two miles and the pain would become incredibly bad in my right knee. I tried stretching it, icing it, but nothing seemed to help. Orthopedic surgeons said that the problem was likely my meniscus, but that surgery wouldn't really do a lot for my leg. This derailed any chance I had of running the marathon and killed my running dreams for the next year.
It was two and a half years later, after Rebecca and I were married and in our last semester at BYU, that I finally decided to give running a go again. I had tried running over the two and a half years, but every time I felt the hatred of running from growing up that killed any real desire to do it more. BYU had a running class though, which meant it was voluntary because I chose to sign up, but still mandatory because I didn't want to fail the class. For whatever reason that motivation worked for me. It was only twice a week, which helped, but I started training for a half marathon at the same time, so I had a goal to work towards. Over that semester I got faster and realized that running could be fun, provided I had the right mindset. The feelings of actually enjoying running that I had with Elder Fletcher started to show up again, and culminated in my fastest time for a half marathon yet. I was really proud of myself for enjoying running and wanted to start doing it voluntarily.
Since then, things have been on and off. I wasn't interested in running most of last year, but Rebecca and I found incredibly cheap tickets out to Utah last April, so we ended up being there for for the half marathon. At that point, however, Mark ran a full marathon and signed up for the full marathon in Baltimore in October. I was super nervous, but decided to run it with him and signed up.
A half marathon, relatively speaking, is a fairly easy distance. If you think about it, FitBit's 10,000 steps can get you between 5-6 miles a day depending on the length of your stride. Seven miles more after that is a distance that a healthy person can walk without much problem. 26.2 miles though? That requires training. I started a training plan through RunKeeper pretty soon after the half marathon in April, including when we went to Poland. And over time, even though it was hard to get out of the house, I started to realize something; I was enjoying running. I liked my nice long run down ul. Czerniakowska, which ended at Willow palace after 5 miles. I could just pop in my music and go, and it was awesome. Plus, I was getting faster. I won't ever win any kind of award for the fastest time, but I was able to pound out miles at a pretty good clip for me. It was really exciting. But I still wan't quite to the point where I knew I could run 26.2 miles. Truth be told, I was just scared of trying it because then I would know how absolutely miserable that distance was. When we got back into the swing of things after coming home I ran intermittently, and definitely not as much as I should, but I ran a 20-mile course a couple weeks before the marathon and I thought it went okay, so I figured that I would be okay doing the marathon. The main thing, though, was that I was willing and excited to run the marathon, even if it was hard. I was ready to complete the longest run I had ever thought of doing, and I was doing it with a good attitude and a level of excitement.
On race day, October 15, 2016, Mark and I went down to the starting line (thank you Mama for the closest hotel you could ever dream of), and I was so nervous. I knew that this race was going to be long, hard, and take forever. Was I really doing this? Did all of my hatred of running really lead to this point, where I was going to run 26.6 miles? No time to think about it, because we were off!
Something I wish I had known before running the Baltimore marathon: Baltimore is so crazy hilly. On a normal run (because a marathon is NOT a normal run), a couple hills aren't that big a deal. You get out of breath and slow down, but you keep going.
When you start off the race going uphill, you should now you're in for some pain! My favorite sign of the race was at mile 23, when everyone around me (you know, the really slow ones) is walking and we resembled a shuffling zombie horde, said: "It's all downhill from here...(almost)." That was the race. Constant hills, and after 20 miles when your feet are killing you and your back feels like you've been lifting heavy boxes with your back instead of your legs, the last thing you want to see is an uphill. We hit a bridge over the river at around mile 24, and the incline wasn't that big, but we all just hit it and if someone was running, they immediately started walking. It was so painful to see and run all of those hills. If I run Baltimore again, I'll definitely try to run more hills before to prepare.
In conjunction with all of the hills, I had a pretty good first half marathon. I felt consistent in my pace, I didn't feel in too much pain, and my mindset didn't think it was too long. After that though, I really slowed down. I started walking a lot about mile 18, and the last 8 miles were me just trying to be faster than 15 minute miles. It was pretty embarrassing because I thought I was better prepared, but I take solace in the fact that I had no clue what a marathon would be like and now I do know, so I will prepare better for the next one. Those last 8 miles I hated all the relayers, who only had 6 miles to run but were running/walking at the same pace I was. Get your butts moving, there is no way you are in as much pain as me! But I kept moving. I knew my time wouldn't be great, but I was proud of the fact that I was running a marathon and was going to finish.
There really was never a doubt that I would finish, and finish I did! I made sure to run the last half mile or so, and you better believe the hardest part was the last .2 miles. After 26 miles, you are just like: "Why in the heck would ANYONE add .2 miles to the end of this thing?!" Also, you finished the marathon, but you had to walk down a long chute to get to the medals and food. Just give me a medal at the end!
It is a GORGEOUS medal, shaped like a crab inscribed with: "Run 26.2" and opens up to show the Baltimore inner harbor on the inside of the crab.
It is AWESOME and made everything worth it. The food was great too. I had this delicious mint chocolate Gatorade bar that tasted like a thin mint, oranges, potato chips, bananas....it wasn't the best spread I've ever had after a half marathon/marathon, but it was pretty good.
I don't even know how to sum up everything that went into this race. It felt like the culmination of my running experience over the last 15 years, hence all of the explanation. Going from hating running, to little glimmers of wanting to run, to getting to the point where I run a marathon and wanted to do it on my own. I know I want to run another marathon, and that speaks more to how much has changed for me than I would have ever thought.
My entire running experience started way back in Germany. I was about ten and had a nightmare of a time sleeping (sleeping metaphor while talking about sleeping). Like, I would go to bed at eight and not fall asleep until around midnight. I would start panicking about sleeping after an hour of laying awake in bed and would work myself up until I didn't fall asleep. To this day, I still calculate how many hours of sleep I can get if I go to bed at a particular time and plan to wake up at a given hour the next day. I also remember waking Mark us so I wasn't the only one staying awake, because Mark had zero problems sleeping (nothing has changed there!)
My mom decided that if I were to get enough exercise during the day, I would sleep better at night. So I remember one day she took us out running with her. At first it seemed fun, like we were just going out together for a quick jog or something. After twenty minutes of still running away from the house, I started to realize that this was no longer some game. It REALLY became not a fun game when she told Mark and me to go out running on our own the next day and to run the same path we had run the day before.
Thus began a daily routine. We would get home from school and know that at some point we would have to go running that afternoon. The daily length was three miles, usually along this farm path behind our house that went up a huge hill, past this pond filled with tadpoles in the summer (appropriately named Tadpole Lake by us), then run to a bench that was a ways further along the road. To this day I bet that I could describe every turn of that run, because I know it so well. Alternatively, we could run around the block six times. Only after we did our running could we play video games or watch TV for the allotted hour and a half.
I hated running. Literally, LOATHED running with every fiber of my being. Even now, at a point in my life where I actually enjoy running (more on that later), I still get this sense of rage and hatred towards those three miles and what they were for me. I don't even know why I felt that way, because I knew it wasn't that far or that big a deal, but I hated it so much. I dreaded when my dad would come home from work, because his first or second question from him was always: "Did you do your running?" And the answer was always either "yes", with defiance or sullenness because I hated it, or "no," which meant he would either make us go run it or an argument would ensue.
A byproduct of this was that I always wanted to get out of it. Sometimes it was through pure substitution. When Mark and I did swim team, we didn't have to run because we were swimming for several hours. Since I enjoyed swimming, this was obviously a better alternative. Others were less honest means. The most famous time is when Mark got caught hiding in a tree, trying to hide out for the usual amount of time it takes to run three miles. We also figured out that walking to the pond took about the same amount of time as it would take to run to the bench. The most honest way was probably just deciding that we would not watch TV that day instead of going running. However, that one didn't usually work because the whole point was to go running, not to stop us from watching TV.
Funny thing is, looking back on it, I was going about running all wrong. I distinctly remember going out running in the rain with a heavy winter coat, jeans, and clogs. Who does that? It never occurred to me to change because then it might be more enjoyable than all these clothes making me super hot and uncomfortable.
This continued through our entire time in Germany. When we moved to Pennsylvania, we sort of did running around the neighborhood, but it was never really the same, or at least I don't remember it being the same. Maybe it was because we were now busy with other stuff that there wasn't time for running, or we didn't get home until 4:30 or 5:00 anyways given how late school got out in comparison to German schools, but I don't remember running much in Pennsylvania. I do remember hating it when I did run, except when I could run in gym class with some friends. That was always better than doing it alone or during free time after school. It was a complicated relationship, to say the least.
One important point about all of this running that I grudgingly recognized, even when I didn't want to do it: I was pretty good at it. I was never going to be super fast because that wasn't how I approached running. Since I always ran with the goal of finishing 3 miles, but not necessarily quickly (a 45 minute walk to do it was just fine with me instead of the 30 minute run), I never ran with the thought of pushing myself to finish faster. That being said, I could always run for a longer time than most of the people I knew growing up. I was comfortable running long distances, and that never really changed, even when I wasn't running on a regular basis. This became important (especially last week in the marathon), but it was present the entire time.
My running habits didn't really change for me my freshman year. I would say that I was going to run with my roommates, then I ended up not doing it after all. I still didn't think of running as an enjoyable experience and was pretty determined to never seriously run in my life again. I knew I could run a 5K or something if I wanted to on a whim, but I didn't want to do it for exercise. Whenever I would start running on my own I would think: "Why am I doing this? I hate this," and would stop after a mile or so, so too early to really get any physical exercise out of it. My mental blocks from hating running were definitely still up.
On my mission, we were encouraged to take a half hour every morning to exercise. If you're going to get 19-21 year old boys out of bed at 6:30 AM, then you need to make sure that they don't fall back asleep. Getting their blood flowing and endorphins pumping is certainly a good way to do that! And this is the point where I started to let me feelings towards running start to thaw. Five years after Germany, I realized that although I wasn't super fast, I was still decent at this. The high point came when Aaron Fletcher was my companion in Szczecin. He and I had some really hard times doing missionary work, but we would go out in the mornings and run two miles together. He was a cross country runner at BYU before his mission, so he appreciated someone who was at least willing to go out and give him the chance to run. I was grateful for someone who was willing to be patient with me while I was running and tried to make it fun. I don't remember ever getting out of bed all six days we could run to go running, but I know we went running more often than not, and I definitely got faster over the nine weeks we were together. He motivated me to think about running after my mission and pushed me to try and run during the rest of my mission. I attribute a lot of my change in perspective to him, because he made running enjoyable to me for the first time ever.
That being said, it was hard to get other companions to run with me after he and I split up and I was never motivated enough to get myself out of the door every day. I went running a couple of times a transfer after that and still felt happy about running, but I was never as serious about it as I was with Elder Fletcher. That being said, my experience with him changed my perspective. I felt happy about the prospect of running after my mission and set a goal to run the Baltimore marathon the October after my mission. I figured that even if I couldn't run while on my mission, I could start doing it after I got home.
I got home in July and the marathon was in October. I found a cheap running app (seriously, I don't know what it was doing) that told me I needed to run two to three times a week to get ready for the marathon. So I started out doing what it told me. I remember running a six-mile run a couple of days after I got home, then running a ten-mile run. I was at Interlochen with my family, and I remember surprising everyone that I was willing to just go out and run ten miles. Me, the kid who hated running with a passion? Running? It didn't seem like this would last very long.
It ended up not lasting very long, but not for the reasons you would think. Something you have to understand was that I came home from my mission pretty malnourished. I had fed myself for two years in Poland, which meant that my lunches often consisted of bread, some deli meat, fruit, and a huge chocolate bar. Dinner was pasta with a red or white sauce. Not exactly the best diet for someone walking upwards of ten miles a day. So I weighed 165 pounds when I came home and it wasn't a good kind of skinny. With all of the walking stress that I had put on my legs during my mission, added to some long runs for which I hadn't really trained, something was bound to break. I tore my meniscus a week and a half after my mission, but kept trying to run on it through the next couple of months. I would hit two miles and the pain would become incredibly bad in my right knee. I tried stretching it, icing it, but nothing seemed to help. Orthopedic surgeons said that the problem was likely my meniscus, but that surgery wouldn't really do a lot for my leg. This derailed any chance I had of running the marathon and killed my running dreams for the next year.
It was two and a half years later, after Rebecca and I were married and in our last semester at BYU, that I finally decided to give running a go again. I had tried running over the two and a half years, but every time I felt the hatred of running from growing up that killed any real desire to do it more. BYU had a running class though, which meant it was voluntary because I chose to sign up, but still mandatory because I didn't want to fail the class. For whatever reason that motivation worked for me. It was only twice a week, which helped, but I started training for a half marathon at the same time, so I had a goal to work towards. Over that semester I got faster and realized that running could be fun, provided I had the right mindset. The feelings of actually enjoying running that I had with Elder Fletcher started to show up again, and culminated in my fastest time for a half marathon yet. I was really proud of myself for enjoying running and wanted to start doing it voluntarily.
Since then, things have been on and off. I wasn't interested in running most of last year, but Rebecca and I found incredibly cheap tickets out to Utah last April, so we ended up being there for for the half marathon. At that point, however, Mark ran a full marathon and signed up for the full marathon in Baltimore in October. I was super nervous, but decided to run it with him and signed up.
A half marathon, relatively speaking, is a fairly easy distance. If you think about it, FitBit's 10,000 steps can get you between 5-6 miles a day depending on the length of your stride. Seven miles more after that is a distance that a healthy person can walk without much problem. 26.2 miles though? That requires training. I started a training plan through RunKeeper pretty soon after the half marathon in April, including when we went to Poland. And over time, even though it was hard to get out of the house, I started to realize something; I was enjoying running. I liked my nice long run down ul. Czerniakowska, which ended at Willow palace after 5 miles. I could just pop in my music and go, and it was awesome. Plus, I was getting faster. I won't ever win any kind of award for the fastest time, but I was able to pound out miles at a pretty good clip for me. It was really exciting. But I still wan't quite to the point where I knew I could run 26.2 miles. Truth be told, I was just scared of trying it because then I would know how absolutely miserable that distance was. When we got back into the swing of things after coming home I ran intermittently, and definitely not as much as I should, but I ran a 20-mile course a couple weeks before the marathon and I thought it went okay, so I figured that I would be okay doing the marathon. The main thing, though, was that I was willing and excited to run the marathon, even if it was hard. I was ready to complete the longest run I had ever thought of doing, and I was doing it with a good attitude and a level of excitement.
On race day, October 15, 2016, Mark and I went down to the starting line (thank you Mama for the closest hotel you could ever dream of), and I was so nervous. I knew that this race was going to be long, hard, and take forever. Was I really doing this? Did all of my hatred of running really lead to this point, where I was going to run 26.6 miles? No time to think about it, because we were off!
Something I wish I had known before running the Baltimore marathon: Baltimore is so crazy hilly. On a normal run (because a marathon is NOT a normal run), a couple hills aren't that big a deal. You get out of breath and slow down, but you keep going.
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| This is me when I still felt good :-) |
In conjunction with all of the hills, I had a pretty good first half marathon. I felt consistent in my pace, I didn't feel in too much pain, and my mindset didn't think it was too long. After that though, I really slowed down. I started walking a lot about mile 18, and the last 8 miles were me just trying to be faster than 15 minute miles. It was pretty embarrassing because I thought I was better prepared, but I take solace in the fact that I had no clue what a marathon would be like and now I do know, so I will prepare better for the next one. Those last 8 miles I hated all the relayers, who only had 6 miles to run but were running/walking at the same pace I was. Get your butts moving, there is no way you are in as much pain as me! But I kept moving. I knew my time wouldn't be great, but I was proud of the fact that I was running a marathon and was going to finish.
There really was never a doubt that I would finish, and finish I did! I made sure to run the last half mile or so, and you better believe the hardest part was the last .2 miles. After 26 miles, you are just like: "Why in the heck would ANYONE add .2 miles to the end of this thing?!" Also, you finished the marathon, but you had to walk down a long chute to get to the medals and food. Just give me a medal at the end!
I don't even know how to sum up everything that went into this race. It felt like the culmination of my running experience over the last 15 years, hence all of the explanation. Going from hating running, to little glimmers of wanting to run, to getting to the point where I run a marathon and wanted to do it on my own. I know I want to run another marathon, and that speaks more to how much has changed for me than I would have ever thought.
We are so proud of you finishing 26.2 miles. I sure wish I could have done it with you guys! We're glad you are running for yourself now.
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