The year is ending and with that, this is the time to spend with family and friends to celebrate.
It’s also a time where the days are shorter, weather tends to bring overcast clouds, and thoughts turn inward.
I love long, warm, sunny days where the days welcome you to go outward and not inward.
By nature, I’m a nester, a loner. I enjoy my time by myself but with these short days, it almost seems claustrophbic at times. So this time of year can and is always a challenge for me.
To combat these feelings which can be sometimes overwhelming, I try to exercise more, go out more, and find projects to do.
Of the three, exercising has been working the best for me plus having a running goal to work towards in the fairly near future.
Over the last few months as you know, I have been seriously toying with the thought of running a marathon. Yep, that is 26.2 miles.
I have been training towards this goal for the last 10 weeks with SoleRunners but I haven’t quite committed. At first, I thought I would wait until a couple of weeks before the actual race to see whether my body will hold up and on the weather. But now, I plan to register since my body and mind has held up on our 3 hour run on the last Saturday of 2014.
But I must admit just the 3 hour hilly run was a HUGE challenge and seeing the January and February training schedule is almost enough to sway anyone to sit on the couch and call these marathoners “crazy.”
Yep, we are crazy!
View from the top of the mountain from our 3 hour run.
Here is the elevation from our run up this mountain.
By the the first of February, we are to run 4:20 hours or 26 miles whichever comes first. That is just daunting to me as are running the hills, the steep hills. So far, we have had an elevation climb of over 1000 feet and that was in 3 hours. From here, I’m not sure if we run more hills after we climb this big mountain on each of our long runs or is that area is fairly flat. I’m hoping for some fairly flat.
But I do have faith in our training schedule especially since I have looked at the elevation for the LA Marathon. Over the course of 26.2 miles, the total elevation is “only” 200 feet. And, yes, I will probably be repeating “only 200 feet” when I’m running up any of those hills.
What do you do to keep the winter “blues” away? Do you nest or do you socialize more? What do you do?