Re-Energized

Everyone knows what it's like to be in a slump whether it's in your personal life, Christian life, or, as it is in my case, my exercise life. In graduate school I was an avid runner. I would wake up at 4AM to get in a run before leaving home at 5:30am for the hospital while on rotations. I trained for half and full marathons in the smouldering summer heat and 100% humidity of North Carolina and loved every minute of it. It's the only time when I was happy to gain 5 pounds because it was due to the added muscle that came from distance running.

Something happened to my running enthusiasm after we finished school and moved. Maybe it was the difficulty of acclimating to running at altitude, or maybe I was just looking for a new challenge after 10 years of pounding the pavement. I found a new love in the tri-sport. I began training for and completing triathlons. This past summer I have enjoyed completing about 4 of them with my last one coming up in a couple of weeks. After that, I'm going to hang up my tri-suit until next February. I hope to pick it back up next year.

My friend recently loaned me a book called "Born to Run" and it has really re-energized my desire to run. You can see about it at the below link.

http://borntorun.org/

So, for the first time in almost a decade, I'm going to try distance running again. A marathon is a bit much for me right now b/c I frankly don't have the time for that kind of training, nor do I have the joints, but a 1/2 is a decent goal and there is one coming up in Oct (actually right around my birthday!). I found a good training schedule online and have tailored it to 3 runs/week rather than 4 (see below). Oddly enough, training for the 1/2 will be less time consuming than training for tri's and I'm looking forward to concentrating on one sport for a while. It will be fun!

http://www.halhigdon.com/halfmarathon/inter.htm