In Which I Complete My First Half Marathon!

I did it!! I finished my first half marathon yesterday. Come on a pictorial half marathon walk with me and my co-crazy-lady, J, who agreed to undertake this insanity with me.

Okay, we got to the parking lot for the half marathoners at 4:30 a.m., jump onto a bus, and half an hour later were at the start area. Yea, that meant rising at 3 a.m. so I could eat breakfast and pick up J. Can you even see the balloons at the start chute? Dang, I realize I've remembered my hard boiled egg for breakfast but forgot my Tylenol. This could get ugly. Hundreds of runners start huddling around the heaters in the complete dark. My mystery-reading, half alseep brain starts conjuring up great story lines from this.

It warmed up to a gorgeous mid-70s degrees Farenheit by afternoon, but it was still stinking cold in the early hours, in the low 40s, with a breeze that was most unkind to bare legs. Those heaters were no help. And the twenty-something runners had no respect for their elders and glued themselves next to the heaters, sucking up what little heat they offered. Yea, they did throw some heat--up at 7 feet. No help. But the top of my head was slightly warmed up. J and I left the heater and just made our way into the center of the mass of people after a large enough crowd had assembled. 1200+ people generate a heck of a lot more heat than those stinking heaters do.  See J shiver.

Ahh, here comes the sun over the back side of the Catalina Mountains! C'mon sun, bring some heat!

Your shivering correspondent.

The 1200+ half marathoners started lining up at the chute at 6:45 a.m. J and I are courteous walkers, so we hung out until the last group of 200 to enter the chute so we wouldn't be in anyone's way. Or get run over. Besides, we had more clothes on than most of them. We're tough, we can take it a minute longer.

We start! Just as the sun crests the mountains.

Within minutes, it's light and you can see the line of runners stretched out ahead of us. Note all the walkers!

We've turned off the road on which the marathon started, and are walking now on SR 77. It's surrounded by State Trust land, so the views are stunning--miles and miles of largely undeveloped desert.  See the Tortolita Mountains in the distance? They're about 18 miles west of us or so at this point. This isn't a marathon--this is just another beautiful desert hike. Piece of cake.  Famous last words.

Then, at mile 6, we turn on Oracle Road, and the nice hike turns ugly. Main drag, lots of cars, exhaust, and a killer blacktop that strips your hips and makes your feet hurt. I kept telling J that training along the River Park was pretty, but we needed to walk on tarmac to get us ready, but she hates the exhaust and hates the lack of view, so she wouldn't. That was a mistake, and I should have insisted since I knew better. By mile 10 my hips were soar and my feet, which hadn't hurt one bit during all the training walks, were hurting. No, I didn't hit a wall, but I did start thinking "Please, please let this be over soon!" Now I kick myself over the forgotten Tylenol.

At just under Mile 9, the winner of the full marathon runs past us. He's not even breaking a sweat, just cruising along at a lovely pace. I straighten up and stride purposefully. At Mile 10, J started to tell me about some office gossip--I'm good to go for at least a mile on that fuel.  Seriously, even though we had done 11 mile walks during our training, the blacktop was a severe issue and my hips were hurting the last 2 miles. This sign makes me very happy, especially since we've turned off the main drag and are on much softer side roads.

Sorry, no photo of the Mile 13 sign--I didn't want to get in the way since several full marathon runners were reaching the finish line as we did. We were passed by about 11 or 12 on the walk, but then another 4 or 5 came through in the last stretch. One man was running in huaraches, based on the famous Tarahuamara running sandals. Our coworker M ran the half in a Santa hat, ho ho ho.

As we crossed the chip reading mat at the entrance to the finish, the announcer called out "And here come Frick and Frack of Here finishing the half marathon. And they're smiling!" That was because I'd just caught sight of our time on the board as we turned the 90-degree corner off the mat into the chute. I'd told myself my goal was 3.5 hours, as near to that on either side as I could get. A 15-minute mile pace was the goal, but I wasn't sure we could reach that, or sustain it. I started laughing with this amazing surge of pride and relief when I saw the time as we turned the corner into the finish chute--3 hours, 3 minutes, 40+ seconds. I crossed the finish line at 3 hours, 4 minutes, and a few seconds. We blew my goal out of the water!! Our average was a 13.7 minute mile!!!!!

I'm not sure I'll do another half marathon, or if I'll stick to 5ks and 10ks. I don't know if I'll ever be so focused on a time and pace goal again. But I'm so pleased I did this. I wanted to test my body and its strengths and resources after my mid-life birthday, and I'm happy that it's still pretty resilient. I don't mind aging, or the small aches this morning, but I want to be able to age with health and graceful acceptance of what I can and cannot do. This proved I can still do some major things with the mileage on this puppy. She may be wrinkled and sagging, but she still pulls through in the clutch.

In Which I Hurt

...or, more accurately, am sore.

Last Saturday I missed my training walk for the half marathon because I was volunteering with the Delta Society tests. We had 14 dog-handler teams scheduled for certification testing or re-testing. Sounds boring? Not if you have secret aspirations of community theater! N, who bears a remarkable resemblance to my mother (originally from NJ, raspy voice, short, not the most patient in the world) and I are the designated arguers. At a particular moment in the exam, we start arguing very loudly in order to see how the dog responds to this audible distraction in the midst of other visual and audible distractions. Being me, I like to throw N curveballs and yell "How could you say that to her about me??" or "I hate anchovies on pizza! Who puts anchovies on pizza!" or one of my favorites, "No, I'm taking that dog home with me, you can forget about it." (That last usually throws the testee a bit and makes them relax.) This year, a woman with a giant mastiff was being tested, so I threw out "Now that's a dog! Not that little pipsqueak thing you call a dog!" N was startled and didn't know what to say (of course I didn't mean it, gentle readers. Her dogs are very sweet, and one is usually our neutral testing dog).  I also tried  a wailing "How could you??" with a tear in my voice, because honestly, we've never run across people arguing in the hospital, but we come across people crying all the time. As an acting improv, it flopped.  (Stinkerbelle gets very solemn when she spies someone crying and goes over to them and is quiet--a rarity for her--and tries to lick them better.)  I got to be flapper (hospital gown flapper, that is) but not bumper this time. But the test runs all day, and I left my house just after 8 a.m., so that meant no time for a Saturday walk.

Or a Sunday walk, as I spent last Sunday weed whacking my backyard down to the nub and raking all the grass up to get ready for this weekend, when I thatched, spread winter rye grass seed followed by a manure topping  mix. After cutting 7 bags full off my Texas Ranger shrubs the week before. Just call me Little Mossy Garden Busy Bee.

So that puts me and J one week behind schedule for our half marathon. But since the training schedule has two or three 6-mile Saturdays when you're supposed to work on pace, I decided to skip one of those designated 6-milers and just keep increasing distance so we'd be back on track in just a couple of weeks. J couldn't walk this Saturday, so I did my 7 miles alone, listening to an audiobook.

All was going fine until about mile 6, when my hips started aching really bad and I realized I'd forgotten to take a Tylenol before I left home. Luckily, I ran in to S and her dog R (R visits with Stinkerbelle at the local hospital) right about then, so I slowed to walk with them and chat for a bit. S has an ACL injury, so it really was a slow walk, then I took off and walked the last mile at a leisurely pace. And found, when I got back home, that I had to sort of pour myself out of the E because even though I stretched back at the car after that mile-long cooling off final walk, I still had stiffened up into pretzel as starched as a nun's veil.

Now I've spent half an hour researching hip pain on the web and terms like lordosis and sacroliliac joint dysfunction are skipping around my brain. So two pearls of wisdom to keep in mind from now on:

1. Stretch, stretch, stretch!!
2. Middle age ain't for sissies.

(The Mt. Lemmon marathon was yesterday, and the winner ran uphill, 26.2 miles, in the same amount of time I am aiming to walk 13.1 miles downhill. Harumph)

In Which I Post a Marathon Training Update

Training for my December marathon officially starts in September, 17 weeks before the event, but as you know, I've been trying to get my sorry butt into better shape before I start training so I can maximize whatever benefits that training will have on a sagging, pasty, inflexible middle aged body. It's really sort of the anti-marathoner body.

So, after 3 months of increasing both distance and rate, I can happily report that my basal walking rate has moved from 3.6 mph to a very comfortable 3.8 mph. It takes me between one-half and one mile to really hit my stride, but I've found the past three weeks that I can easily walk the next 3 miles at 3.8 (or more) without a hitch. I've been doing some interval training on certain days, which has definitely helped. 4.0 mph may be attainable after all! (Don't worry, I still hate running with a passion!)

So now, my weekday walks will settle into walking for speed to build up my pace, while the weekend walks will start getting longer. I've only done 4 miles so far, partly because it's so dang hot, but next month it should start to cool off in the early morning hours, which should make increasing to 6 and then 8 and then 11 miles much more easy.

I now have three of those cute little skort exercise skirty things and they make me feel like a real athlete. Not a jock, because jockdom is way beyond my capabilities, and always has been. But an Athlete with a capital A. One even has flirty little one-inch slits on each side, the purpose of which I am unclear about but which make it more skirtier. It's hot pink. Can you see my big smile just thinking about it's pinky glory? And three pairs of those scientifically designed socks that wick sweat away from you. They don't wick away my hot flashes, though. Now that I have the uniform down, my next adventure will be in the Food Category. Apparently there are gels and nut butter tubes and all kinds of disgusting things out there to keep the marathoner upright. I'm contemplating how to stash a blueberry muffin in my 1.5-liter hydration pack because the thought of squirting some gel thing makes me shudder. But I'd want a nice cup of hot, strong tea with that muffin and there's no way I'm carrying my thermos with me.  Although, there is a bungee cord stretchy thing on the front of my pack...

Oh, but that might lead to bathroom issues, and I just read the section on that in my How to Walk book and am wondering about adult diapers as a desperate measure.

I'm listening to Charlaine Harris this week. Not the Sookie Stackhouse series, because paranormal stuff doesn't interest me, but the first Aurora Teagarden mystery, Real Murders. This is the best reader so far of the audio books I've listened to the last month.

In Which I Begin Training

So after the big reveal last month that I was going to undertake a half-marathon in December, I immediately started training.And how does a Nerdy Scientist start training? Why, with research, of course! There's only one thing a Nerdy Scientist likes more than research, and that's the actual experiment. We shall see if that holds true for marathoning, the actual experiment in this case.

First I looked up training schedules. I found several online, but all begin the training 17 weeks before the event. Heck, I need more time than that! I'm not completely out of shape, but I am not marathon ready. Then I tried to find walkers' blogs that detail their marathon experience. A few hits, but not as many as I'd expected. C'mon, bloggers, a half-maratoin is a worthy achievement to document! I want to read your experiences. Thirdly, I looked up the specific marathon, thinking surely there is blogging marathoner here in the Metropolis. Apparently not. Unless they are trying to be incognito, like me, or are shy, or embarrassed by their time. They've been holding this marathon for 30 years, but it's a big cyber secret as far as I can tell.

I started training early for several reasons. I am ashamed to admit that my performance in the timed 10K last month wasn't as good as I'd thought it would be. I mean, I know I did it cold and all, but still, we started first and ended near the back of the pack. Ouch. I finally found my competitive streak. I don't have it re: my career at all, but it reared its ugly head when faced with the dismal time printed out in black and white. So I determined that my December time would be improved, and I've set out deliberately to try and improve my time. 30 seconds would be great, but may be unrealistic. I can easily walk the half marathon in 4 hours right now, but I want to be as close to 3.5 hours as I can be. Anything better is cake!

I jumped more fully back into my exercise routine: cardio (weight-lifting) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (several different routines out of magazines so I don't get bored, increasing the number of reps every week or so, or jumping rope), and then extra walking on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One day I go for speed (I started interval training about 3 weeks into this) and another day I go for distance. Since Mr. Big is recovering so well from his gimpy leg and I am so worried it'll be reinjured, I only started taking them to the dog park a month ago, and only one day a weekend. That gives me one weekend morning for 5km around the golf course (so I can time the distance and track my progress). That interval training is going to work, I know it will, but I hate running, even the short distance between two light poles.

Lady Scientist J and I went to the Canyon on Sunday for our first conditioning walk. Four miles, at a reasonable pace, because the first 2 miles were uphill. At the 2 mile marker, I checked my pedometer (still working despite being dropped several times--yea!) and we turned around and did the second half all downhill (except for that last climb out of the canyon, which is just a small hill, but my knee twinged on  it--dang middle age). Our time was 1 hour 9 minutes for the whole 4 miles, and our speed was 3.77 mph. Not bad for our first conditioning walk!  That means I could do the half today (if I could keep this speed up the whole way) in my 3.5 hour goal. With 5.5 months to train and a course that's all downhill for the half marathoners, it's going to be do-able. Do-able without incapacitation.

That was a big sigh of relief you just heard.