I went for my longest pre-race walk on Saturday. I am proud to tell you that I walked ten miles and averaged 4 miles per hour. My plan is to take several two to three mile walks over the next few weeks and a five or six miler next weekend and then kill it on May 5th with 13.1!
Getting to this point involved a big support system.
It's been a yucky spring. In fact, it hasn't felt like spring at all. Winter has just gone on and on. I am not a big fan of walking outside in the cold or the early morning dark. So, our trusty treadmill has been the biggest benefactor in getting me to the half marathon.
Treadmill walking, however, can quickly lead to boredom. The minutes sometime feel like hours, while the hours feel like weeks. To keep me entertained, I am most thankful for my Kindle. I accomplished quite a bit of reading during my half-marathon training and it really (really!) helped the time to pass more quickly. I also have a little prayer book that kept me good company while I walked. It helped me to stay focused on my prayer time, which is important because my brain tends to wander.
To keep me motivated, I am so thankful for my sweet sister and sister-in-law and our "Team bAM" emails. We emailed each other every few weeks to check up on each others training progress and to encourage one another in our walks. This really helped to motivate me as I tried to keep up with them and it also kept me accountable, as I knew that I would have to email them my mileage and general progress reports.
My other motivator was my March goal of walking 50 miles before I allowed myself to get new shoes. It worked. I actually walked mile 50 on April 1st, but didn't let myself wear the new shoes until I had that last mile completed.
For the first few months of training, the only walks that I completed outside were our usual dog walking routes. We have three routes that we take pretty regularly and I have long been familiar with their distances (or at least a rough estimation of their distances). These routes are 2 miles or shorter, so they worked well for minimizing time outside during the cold weather and I sometimes supplemented them with treadmill time.
By the end of March, I decided that I couldn't wait for the weather to get warmer and just needed to suck it up and walk outside. At that point, I knew that I needed an app to track how far I walked and to keep my pace for me. I downloaded Walk Tracker GPS Fitness and it has been wonderful. The only issues that I have had with it can all be contributed to user error. I seem to have trouble remembering to push "pause" or to restart the app after my stretching breaks.
Although I completed the vast majority of my walks in the pre-dawn hours, I have to thank Brian for being on constant baby duty. He and Sam were troopers and did a great job of keeping me from feeling guilty about my time away from them.
With all that, I have to say thanks to my entire support system and also thanks to my legs and feet for continuing to move even when they were numbed by the cold and thought they had already gone far enough.
I can hardly wait to take a photo with a "13.1" caption. Race day, here we come!
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