Run Boy, Run

My Nana was quite a card.  Sometimes as we watched movies and as a chase scene ensued, she would root for the pursued by saying "Run boy! Run!"

Tomorrow my little brother is running a long, long way.  He's doing a half marathon down in St. Louis.  That's right.  13.1 miles.  Uff Da.  I can hear Nana saying Run boy! Run! although with any luck, he will not be pursued by any bad guys.

I will more than likely NEVER run that far all at once, unless there is a zombie apocalypse and that's how far the nearest car dealership or gun store is.  I am toying with the idea of doing an Olympic distance triathlon next summer.  That would be a 6.2 mile run.  After a mile swim and a 25 mile bike.  That seems possible somehow.  Perhaps I'm delusional, but if I can do all four sprint triathlons this season without injury or burning out, then I think an Oly is in the cards for next year.  Maybe bracketed by a couple of sprints.

What has me all hyped about this?  Well, as you may know, last year I did a sprint tri.  All through training and even the event itself I wasn't able to run solid for the three miles.  I trained for 9 weeks and the longest stretch I did was one mile before I stopped to walk and catch my breath.

A few nights ago I went for a swim and had planned to do some 200 yard swims to train.  On my first 200 I felt pretty good on the last 25 and decided to ignore that little voice in my head that was saying to just do a bunch of short swims and keep going.  I kept going until I did an entire 500.  I followed it up with another 1000 of 100's and 50's.  A couple nights later I did the same thing.  The 500's felt pretty good.  Tonight I went for a run.  Instead of doing the usual X minutes running and X minutes walking, I decided to just suck it up and run as far as I could.  After my warm up walk I started.  I ran out to just shy of the 0.7 mark when the thunderstorm that had been threatening gave me a final warning with an amazing lightning show and subsequent rolling thunder wave.  I took this as a warning that I should head back home before it started in earnest and ran all the way back to where I started.  That almost 1.4 mile run is no biggie to my brother, who warms up with that.  But for me it was huge.  If the lightning had not turned me around, I may have run to the 1 mile mark.  Or maybe the 1.5 mile mark.  Any way I slice it though, I think I'll be running all of the runs in my triathlons this season.

That whole Just Do It thing really does hold true.  No excuses.  No whining.  I just did it.  And it was a good start.  I could almost hear Nana saying Run boy!  Run!

More Later