Half Marathon

Here I sit on the verge of my first half marathon.

If you missed my post earlier in the week, I'm running the Route 66 Half Marathon in Tulsa, Oklahoma this coming Sunday. Tomorrow, I'll go to work and then head to the airport and fly to Tulsa. I'm staying at a hotel in downtown Tulsa, near the race starting line.

Today, I had the day off from work, and I spent the majority of my day packing and readying all of my things to leave tomorrow for Tulsa. I think that the great degree of thouroughness that I maintained during my packing and readying today was as much a mental exercise as it was the actual act of packing.

I've been planning this trip for almost as long as I've been training for the marathon (so roughly July). Due to the fact that I'm a planner by nature, when I started the preliminary training, I mapped out all of the mileage for the training on a calendar. My 14 mile long run just happened to fall on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. After thoroughly researching what cities were hosting half marathons this weekend, my choices were Philadephia, somewhere in Florida and Tulsa.

Tulsa seemed do-able and had the incredibly nice bonus of being the place where my cousin and uncle are also running the full Marathon this weekend. So . . . my planning began.

My Mom and Dad donated a frequent flyer plane ticket so that I could fly to Tulsa. I bargain shopped for my hotel . . . and tomorrow I'm off!

Today I obsessively packed my suitcase and all of my running gear. I also packed a collection of healthy pre-race snacks so that I'll be all ready on Sunday. I checked the weather--it's going to be gorgeous--mid 40s to start and 60s by the afternoon. That's only slightly cooler than what I've been running in here in Phoenix so that made it easy to know what to bring gear-wise.

I hope I haven't forgotten anything . . . and if I do, hopefully I'll be okay anyway. I'm trying not to get too worked up about it being a "half marathon" and all because really, it's just another long run for me . . . and it's actually a little shorter than I was scheduled to run this weekend (13.1 miles instead of 14 miles) . . . and in the words of my cousin, "It's just a long run with people cheering for you."

I'm excited to get some "race" experience. I think it will be helpful to have done a race or two before PF Chang's in January. It will be one less unknown in this HUGE equation called training for a marathon.

Mentally, I feel excited! I've had a REALLY great week of running and as much as it is small and slow, I've realized that I've lost 5 REAL pounds somewhere along the way (not water weight or daily fluctuation but an actual, slight, baseline shift down). According to a Runner's World article I read, for every 5 pounds you lose, you shave 5.27 minutes off of your marathon time. That out to save me 2.5 minutes this weekend! Hey, anything helps.

It doesn't seem real that I am getting on a plane this weekend to go run a half marathon. Honestly, it still seems like some elaborate plan that I am fabricating because it sounds cool. I can't believe that it's me . . . and that I'm going to be able to say that I've run a half marathon. It's so easy to lose perspective and forget where I started . . . woggling along and being unsure if I could run for a 5 minute block of time.

The crazy thing is that despite how far I've come, the MARATHON still seems just as far away to me as it did when I started. I'm almost half way done with the official marathon training and as much as I guess I am, I DON'T feel like a runner and I DON'T feel like an athlete. I'm not being negative or anything. I just really don't feel that way.

I'm hoping that in the next two days before the race on Sunday, I can really focus on RELAXING and not getting too worked up. I'm bringing along Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer to keep me focused, but I'm also bringing a fun book along (although it does have to do with running), Born to Run.

What I'm most looking forward to about this weekend is walking around the Race Expo on Saturday and seeing all the other runners and also . . . probably a little room service on Saturday morning :)

What I'm least looking forward to about this weekend is the fact that I have to fly home on Sunday night, the day of the race, and I'm going to be flippin' sore. Poor planning. Oh well.

Wish me luck!