He's Going the Distance

Nike+iPod continues to change my life.
Do you have what it takes? When you hit the point of wanting to quit or pushing on will you choose to grit your teeth and accept the blisters you knew you were going to have or will you quit, giving excuses as to why things didn't workout for you? Today I taught myself just how mental running is.

In celebration of the 10th of July I decided to run a record breaking 10 miles today. Farthest I've ever run. Actually it's purely coincidence I ran it on the 10th. In fact I didn't realize until about 10 minutes ago. My previous record is 7 miles, so ya, I blew that one out of the water. I'm not looking forward to the aches tonight when I try to go to bed or the blisters I'll have in the morning, but I feel very accomplished. I wanted to know if I could do the 15k EIU will be holding at the end of the month and I can. I'm a bit of a slow runner when it comes to very long distances, but at least I can do them.

I've always held the belief that running was purely physical until today. I understand why long distance runners typically go through deep psychological hypnotisms each week to prepare for incredibly long distances.

You hit a point where you say to yourself, "Well, I think this is far enough," but you have to push beyond. Then comes the stage where you start to ache. It could be lack of oxygen, blisters on your feet, in my case my hip. I favor one side over the other so at about mile 5 my hip was trying to tell me to just give up. But I didn't. I knew I would have felt unaccomplished if I did.

My next step is a half marathon. I think I'll try to improve by a mile each week until I make it to 13.1 miles. That way I could do the San Francisco Half-Marathon sponsored by Nike in October. All you have to do is pay a nominal fee to participate and complete your run on I think October 21. One of my life goals is to finish a marathon. I'm clearly not going to break any records, but how many can ever say they completed a marathon? Not many.