Even though I signed up with Team in Training in early January, their spring training program didn't actually start until January 30th. I spent the 3 weeks leading up to the kickoff, training by myself; following their rough guide of running every second day, running for 20 minutes the first week, 30 minutes the second week and 40 minutes the third week.
It was my first experience running again for a while and I was really out of breath on that first run. Suddenly the 26.2 miles that I had signed up for seemed so very far out of reach. Sean likes to make fun of how I have a tendency to jump into something with two feet without taking the time to figure out what I'm getting into. It's not unjustified and now I was beginning to think I had bitten off more than I could chew.
But thankfully as the weeks went by and I persisted it became easier. I even managed to run 4 miles in the third week. It's true I was nearly purple by the time I finished but I made it. And what's more I really enjoyed the running. Having a very concrete goal is great motivation to want to push myself past my comfort zone. It feels really great at the end of a 40 minute run to feel like I worked really hard.
Another common trait of mine is to crave actual data which describes my progress. In my early running in New York I used a Polar watch, heart rate monitor and pace monitor to give me feedback on how far I ran and how much it took out of me. Unfortunately there is no GPS on this device and when I looked into how much one would cost it was more than I was willing to pay for this one additional data point. But then I remembered, I already have a device with a GPS. I found an awesome iPhone app called RunKeeper that records all the data I could want, and print lots of pretty graphs and maps to satisfy all my data recording needs. Check out my latest runs here http://bit.ly/cu5QQm
