Trail Running Blog

Running Updates or Lack Thereof

So the month of June has had its fill of both highs and lows. I ran my first marathon on the 6^th and had a lot of mixed feelings. The rest of the month can be summarized by the following:

• Post marathon thoughts: definitely harder than I had anticipated, even though I knew it was going to be a grueling 26.2 miles. The feeling can never be explained quite as well as actually running it.
• What I’ve been doing: swimming, biking, basketball and some running.
• What I want to do: improve my swimming technique and endurance to attempt my first triathlon.
• What I will most likely do: coming to the realization that I do NOT swim anything remotely close to a fish, I may have to abandon the tri, for now. But I still have a 10K, trail race, and at least 2 half marathons to look forward to, so I’m not too sad about that.

On the bright side, swimming after my runs has been a great way to cross train. Even though I took a longer than expected break after my marathon, I am still in good shape to race (I hope). I went to my first triathlon last week and for some reason I expected a small turnout, but I have never see so many bikes parked in one location before. Both the 500m and 1000m distances for the swim looked ridiculously long. I think the distance I was doing in my pool was 10, 20 meters max?

My next race is actually this weekend, what should be a fun 4^th of July 10K. I ran this race last year too and when I ran it, I thought it was a pretty slow time. But looking back now, I don’t think I will be able to even break that time. But who knows, you’d think having one year of base training would help, right?

The first few days after my marathon, when I was telling my coworkers about it, I gave the same response, ‘it was hot, hard and got very tired during the 2^nd half’. But they were all very impressed with the results and said I should be proud, which I am. I didn’t know what to say when asked if I would do another one because I wasn’t sure if I want to put my body through so much pain again? But I definitely learned a lot from my first one and I’m sure if I make a few changes to my race strategy, I could at least improve a little and feel better running it. I haven’t really looked for another one yet, I might do the LA Marathon just because I could visit my parents the weekend of. But that is in March 2011, not sure if I will be doing one before that.

This summer will probably be a hot one so I might go back to morning runs even though waking up early is definitely not something I’m good at or enjoy. But I love having more time to do stuff after work. This will also give me more time to do other cross training including swimming and possibly some in-home workouts as well. Oh, and I also want to find more trails to run on, with lots of hills! I love the fact that there is so much there is to do and I’m excited and looking forward to it all. It should be a fun, eventful summer.