The Runner Girl Loses Her Mind

Yep, I’ve done it. I’ve lost my mind. I have officially decided to train for and run a half marathon. (Cue lame joke about only HALF losing my mind…)

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of running a half for a while now. I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the 5k distance. I’ve done a couple of 10ks. But I noticed that my motivation to run was even lower than it normally was. It was damn near impossible to get my butt out the door because I no longer had a goal.

Last summer I decided to make a healthy living change. I may write another post about that later, but for the purposes of this post, the important thing to know is that I didn’t set out to lose weight necessarily, just to make it so that vegetables weren’t mythical creatures in my diet. But surprise, surprise I started losing weight. After 6 months or so of slow and steady decline, I stalled big time. It also happened to be getting toward spring and I was feeling cooped up and antsy from a long, cold winter.

And then I lost my mind.

It occurred to me that it would be great to get out and run again. Also, that as long as I don’t finish every run with a cheesecake, it may also re-start the weight loss.

So, I started researching different half marathon training programs. It didn’t take long to realize that most half marathon training programs are WAY too athletic for me. Here’s the thing – I just want to run the whole thing and finish. I don’t care about my time. I don’t care about speed work. I don’t want to fartlek. I just want to gradually increase my mileage until I can run for 13.1 miles. That’s it.

I finally stumbled upon the blog Anchors Aweigh and her half marathon training plan. In the post she explains that after having similar frustrations, she and her sister just made their own plan.

Mind. Blown. It seriously hadn’t occurred to me that that was even a thing.

So, working with her plan as a basic backbone, I wrote my own!

Now here are the caveats: this plan assumes a basic level of experience with running. I could run 3 miles. It would suck, but I could do it. My longest run ever was 6 miles. I wanted only to run the whole thing and finish – I’m not worrying about time or pace or building my overall athleticism. The general format is two weekday runs (I do Tuesdays and Thursdays) and a longer weekend run (I do Saturday). The weekday runs are half the distance of that week’s long run.

So that’s it. I am currently in Week 4 and so far so good. The half marathon that I have my eye on doing is downhill through a canyon, so once I get up to 6 mile or so long runs, I plan to start doing my long runs down canyons since I’ve heard that it’s important to train for the downhills.

If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them!