You've Come a Long Way, Baby

Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way. -- Baltasar Gracian

Yesterday I had a long (75 minute) tempo run on my training plan.  Basically the deal was to run a warm-up 20 minutes and then do 7 intervals of 3 minutes hard, 2 minutes easy, followed by 20 more minutes of cool down.  Aside from the fact that I left home at 5:15 am before it was light, no one wants to be staring at their watch the whole run to figure out when to start running hard, etc. -- let alone remember which interval of 7 I was on.  Thankfully I have a really cool watch that lets me program a workout so that it will beep at the appropriate times (and even put on the screen what I'm supposed to be doing if I forget).  It's a Garmin Forerunner 305 and I got it a few years ago for Mother's Day.  I love it, even if it is a big honking thing.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Anyway, the point of this is not a love fest for my watch.  Rather, it was the realization of how far I had come since Mother's Day 2 years ago.  2009 was really the last time I felt like a rock star athletically.  I got hurt training for my marathon in April 2009 and then had a DNF (did not finish) in a triathlon in September 2009. 2010 was a really bad year for me.

But at the beginning of 2011, I decided I was tired of being an unhealthy, overweight shlubby lump.  I decided to train for a half-marathon in August with a training team -- if I have to show up every Saturday morning and run, I couldn't give up.  And it sucked.  I was the slowest person that was on the training team.  There was one other lady who ran about as slow as me and we would run together, but if she wasn't there (or if I had to run on my own because we were out of town), it was a struggle of epic proportions.  The coaches from the training team would come back and encourage me or run with me for a while.  But mostly I was alone.  So I programmed my watch to beep at 4:1 intervals or 3:1 intervals and I would run 3-4 minutes and then walk 1 minute, for 9-13 miles.  And at the end, when I got tired, I would flip the interval and walk 3-4 minutes and run 1 minute.

I had to finish the half marathon that I was training for in less than 3 hours.  A hurricane was coming into town, but they held the race anyway.  It was windy.  It was rainy.  It sucked ass.  But I finished.  In 2:59:56. Because the race director came back and yelled at me until I crossed the finish line.  (He yelled nicely - but he had to yell so I could hear him over the wind.)  Afterwards, I got in my car and cried.  **This is not an unusual occurrence -- I usually cry after races...**  Shlubby fat me.

Why am I writing about this?  Seems like a non-sequitur,eh?  Ha - just wait - I will tie it all back together.  So two days ago, when I was programming my watch for my long tempo run, I was out of spaces for saved workouts in my watch.  I realized the 4:1 and 3:1 intervals were still in there and I deleted them.  Now I run 90+ without walking at all - I don't need those crutch intervals anymore.  In two years, I have turned myself around...not as unhealthy, overweight, or shlubby anymore.  Even people who see me frequently have remarked on how much I've changed (at least my looks - I'll take the compliments!)  I've come a long way, baby!

And because I don't want the title of this post to be tied to a cigarette ad campaign, I'll leave you with a song from Fatboy Slim's album, You've Come a Long Way, Baby.