Saturday, November 9, 2013

A Little Closer to the Goal

Today I finished 6.2 miles. That's a 10k. It may sound a little vain, but I was super proud of myself. That was a huge deal to me and 6 miles had seemed pretty overwhelming. I walked a lot today, which was in part to hang with the folks I was with and in part to follow Dr's orders for my pregnancy. But walking or running, first or last, it didn't matter. I finished. I did a 10K today! That has had me on Cloud 9 for most of the day.

All along in this training process, I've been a bit hard on myself and easily discouraged thinking "I've never done 5 miles" "There's no way I could do 8 miles" "13 miles might as well be 1000." And then on my way home, I realized something. I realized that though I haven't run those miles before, I've hiked. We have done a good bit of hiking in my family and a couple of years ago I was doing a bootcamp training and felt invincible and decided to try and do Mt. Whitney. My dad signed on and we trained together and we hiked various mountains and logged a good number of miles. Our longest pre-Whitney, was 9 miles round trip. On the day of Whitney, we didn't summit, we hadn't trained enough for the 22 mile round trip. BUT, we did make it just over 11 miles round trip. Only half, yes, but nearly a full half marathon of distance!

Today, that made me pretty excited. All of the sudden, training for the Tinkerbell race didn't seem so crazy. I've done longer hikes. And I did 11 miles at pretty high elevation and crazy steep trails. So the streets of Anaheim and Disneyland won't be quite so daunting.

It was nice to realize fully, not only can I do this, but in many ways I have done this distance before, and I didn't train nearly as well as I am this time around!

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