I never thought I would ever come to the point of willingly running a half marathon. For several years I’ve found more interest and fulfillment in weightlifting. Running long distances has not interested me because I thought I would get bored of doing nothing but running and listening for a long time. As well, I’ve never really done running training before, so what would I do to get into training? I knew my running form wasn’t that good because I was a bit of a heel-striker.
But now, I purchased a Garmin Watch at the beginning of this year, and it has a couple scores for endurance. They were a little below average, and I think I was becoming entertained or obsessed with the scores. Additionally, the more I dived into exercise, the more I found that there is additional health benefit to be found with cardio. So a few months ago, I started to run again, because I mainly wanted to have better cardio health.
It was a slow start, as I expected. My 5k time was probably 33-35 minutes; all things considered, that time still wasn’t too bad (from what I hear). But I kept a consistent running schedule, and I looked at the charts from my Garmin watch. Slowly, I started to get stronger in running, I corrected my form from what I learned about running efficiently, and my 5k time improved. So now I was doing hybrid physical training. I ran and I weighlifted, so I wondered if I could do some kind of race with all this training I was doing.
So my wife observed how much more I was running, and she invited me to do a half-marathon with her. My original apprehension of running long distances came forward, but at the same time I knew I wanted to do something with all the training. So I said, “yeah”. We first thought to do the Haunted Provo Half, but scheduling just didn’t work out. So we settled on Thankful Half in Lehi. I also loved the idea of running a half marathon in the morning and going to Thanksgiving dinner later.
How would I prep for a half marathon? That’s 13.1 miles! Oh my gosh that’s a long way; even then, I have hiked longer distances in one day. As I looked around I found that Garmin offered a catered run plan for a planned half marathon, and I knew my wife made running schedules to prep for races. So I started in that direction, and I am currently in the middle of it.
The progress in my cardio health has been encouraging! My 5k time is now down to 29:40 which is probably my fastest ever 5k time, and my endurannce scores are improving. It feels great to do a fast 5k without being completely winded due to less than average endurance. I also did a test 10k run to see how my body behaves while running distances longer than 5k. The 10k run felt surprisingly good! Then I realized it was half a half marathon, and that thought lead me to think that a half marathon won’t be that bad.
I’ve enjoyed watching Chris Hemsworth’s Limitless series, because Chris Hemsworth explores new experiences to improve his health. I’d like to do the same, and I’m sure running a half marathon will be a great experience for me, when my previous races were all 5ks. I am also getting excited to keep up the races for next year! I’ll see if my half-marathon time improves and if I feel up to any other races.