Last year I ran my first-evar half marathon. I set it as a goal around New Years and spent the next 5 and a half months training for it. I took it very seriously. I went running roughly 4 times a week and played with the incline-setting on the treadmill to make it feel like I was running up and down hills (not that Winnipeg has hills, but I was afraid that the marathon course might suddenly develop hills and I refused to be beaten by any sort of hills, imaginary or otherwise).
As soon as it was warm enough, I began training outside. I went running in sun, wind, rain, or shade. I went running on days that were so humid I had to use my inhaler 3 times just to make it back home again. By the time the day of the Marathon actually rolled around, I had technically already run two half-marathons, just to make sure that the 13.1-mile course wouldn't destroy my life and render me incapable of climbing the stairs for weeks or some other awful something. I went shopping for new jogging clothes, and bought a neatly coordinated outfit wherein my jogging top, bra, socks, and shoes all matched. The night before race day, I set out my jogging clothes neatly by my bed, checked twice to make sure I had my preferred type of jogging socks clean and ready to go, and set myself a 10pm bed-time. I prepared 4 disposable water bottles (one for each hand, 2 for in case something happened to render the first water bottles useless) that I had selected weeks ago based on rigorous testing of a variety of water bottle brands to find the perfect weight and shape to fit in my hands whilst running. I woke up 45 minutes before I needed to in order to be sure I had enough time to prepare.
Not so with this year. The day after I finished last year's half-marathon, I lost the will to train and didn't recover it until maybe February or March of this year. I began to half-heartedly run on the treadmill at the gym, but found that I was actually more interested in playing with the freeweights and giving young women erroneous information about the correct use of the chin-up bar than I was interested in jogging. I went jogging outside maybe 5 times but I found the wind to be rather windy, the rain to be rather cold and wet, and the sun to be very sunny, and I had much more fun sitting indoors watching old sitcoms on Netflix.
The night before the Half, I went to a wedding. I spent 12 hours prancing around in ill-fitting high-heeled sandals, and got home so tired I wore my necklace to bed without noticing. On the drive home I realized I had forgotten about water bottles, went diving under the seats of my boyfriend's van and found two rather flattened water bottles that I thought could work. I woke up roughly 15 minutes before I wanted to go and went rooting around in the laundry room for whatever workout clothes were dry enough for me to wear. And I still ran those 13.1 miles in less than 2 and a half hours. The moral of this story: the average Canadian woman's ability to run a half-marathon is not actually affected by whether her sports bra matches her jogging socks.
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