Ready to Race

It has been a little over three months since I began blogging about my up-coming race.  I have not only tried to relay to you an understanding of the emotions one goes through when training, but also what it takes to prepare physically for a long distance race.  I have discussed the difficulty of staying motivated and staying clear of injury.  I have also mentioned my goals and fears related to the upcoming race.

I am now ready to see if all the battles that have been fought, both mentally and physically, were actually won or not.  I am counting down the days until I will be standing in a crowd of people wondering if I will be able to complete this goal I have set for myself.  As I have mentioned previously, my ultimate goal is to finish the race.  However, I very much hope to set a new personal record (PR) for myself. 

Caption Provided by: I <3 to Run

My current PR is 2:09:07 (2 hours, 9 minutes, and 7 seconds), which I ran last September at the Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon in Virginia Beach.  I expect this race, the St. Jude’s Country Music Half Marathon, to be a much more difficult race.  I have been doing quite a bit of research on the layout of the race course, and there is a considerable difference in elevation changes in this race as compared to the Virginia Beach race.  The good news is, I have been working a lot more with the elliptical training machine, which can be adjusted to fit individual/specific training needs.  I guess I will just have to wait and see what happens on race day. 

I have to admit, that during my last race, I was more worried about whether or not I would be able to finish the race.  Now, I am confident that I can finish the race, barring any injuries of course.  I just keep worrying about having a good finishing time.  That is not necessarily a bad thing as I’ve been using it as motivation to train.  Also, I have been training with a new pair of shoes which I got after my last race.  I have had plenty of time to break them in, or should I say they have broken me in.  I have suffered with several blisters covering large portions of my feet since I started training with the new shoes, but that is all part of training with new shoes.  So I will just suck it up, and move on.

Although this is the end to one chapter in this so called “book of life”, I plan to post race day results in a couple of weeks.  After that, I plan to start training for my next event.  I know I want to run the Virginia Beach race again in September, but I have been thinking a lot about taking it to the next level, and training for the Marine Corp Marathon coming up this October.  Still as of yet undecided, so please look for new posts in the near future.