I’ve really struggled with writing this post. I’m post-dating it so that it will appear in proper chronological order of my races and training, but in reality it is coming up on a year since the event. I feel like I should have some profound observations to make about it, because physically it was a very profound thing to experience, but I’ve never felt like I had a way to come up with equivalent words.
These are the moments and memories I took away from it.
I’m going to summarize 2 months of training runs into a single post, so picture a movie-style training montage, but… at the end of it, I’m running slower than I did at the beginning. So kinda like a training montage run in reverse. It would be completely inaccurate to call it the story of me figuring out how to run slowly enough to finish a marathon, but sometimes that was how it felt, and I like the sound of it, so I’m going to say it anyway.
It was a lot of miles and a lot of hours of running. My longest training run was 20 miles, which took me a little over four hours to do. I did that 20 mile run, a couple of 18s, and several 16s. You can do the math if you want, but I think “a lot” covers it pretty well.
The things I learned: