In January of 2014 I started training for a half marathon being held in Washington DC in April of the same year. In March I was running and my legs started hurting more and more, specifically my shins and the ankle on my right foot were awful. We were on vacation in Honolulu that March for spring break and I ran nine miles around the Diamond Head crater. The next day I felt a crack in my right ankle and the limping commenced.
We took a few days in Seattle on the way back home and I limped my way around Pike’s Market and the Emerald City Comic Con. My husband knew I had to go in to the doctor, even if I didn’t want to. I literally thought that I just needed to get my muscles stronger, that they hadn’t been used like this in a long time and I needed to do more. Ugh. So he drove me to an urgent care and they did some x-rays and the lovely doctor told me I had stress fractures and put me in a boot.
Thus ended my first half marathon adventure.
In the months that followed, whenever I tried to run more than five or six miles, my shins and my right ankle would hurt … a lot. I convinced myself that I would never be able to run a half marathon. That I could run 10K’s but never make it more than six miles. Then my sister asked me to run the Disneyland Tinkerbell Half Marathon with her. They aren’t very picky on time there, a lot of people walk the entire half, so I thought “Ok. I can do this.” And I signed up.
Then my sister broke her foot and her son became very ill, so by March of this year, I knew I would be running this half by myself. But her motivation to sign up got me going again. I read some articles on how to alleviate shin pain. How to specifically stretch those muscles. I started taking supplements like collagen and hyaluronic acid. My training this time was not without it’s own issues, but I took better care of myself. I was less rigid about running the distance a training app on my phone told me to run, and I listened to my body. I rode the recumbent bike at the gym when my hip hurt, I swam, and sometimes I took a rest day because I knew I needed it.
Once I ran my 10-mile long run, I knew I could do the half marathon, because I knew I could walk the last three miles if I needed to.
For my training this time I opted to use the Nike+ running app. I used the “Coach” tool to put in the half marathon race date and marked my skill level as a beginner. The Nike+ Coach tool built a training program that was 13 weeks long. My Mondays and Tuesdays were running day, Wednesday was a cross training day, Thursday was a rest day and then I ran a short run on Friday with my long runs on Saturday. At first my long runs were five or six miles, but soon I was running eight miles. And about halfway through the training period, the app had me running Monday through Wednesday with a cross training day on Thursday and then running again on Friday and the long Saturday run. Sunday was my only rest day for six weeks. Except for half marathon week, where my Friday was a rest day.
I took a spring break vacation in mid-March and did not do my long Saturday run, mostly because … I was on vacation, but also because we were walking a lot on our trip. We were in a tourist city where you could take a street car and/or walk everywhere. I put a lot of miles on my feet that week and decided to count those miles, unofficially, as my training.
I ran the half marathon on May 8. My Nike+ app tracked my race at 2 hours 28 minutes 39 seconds. My official Disney time was 2 hours 42 minutes 13 seconds. The disparity in time is my bathroom break during the race. My phone app pauses when I’m not moving (like at a street light or when the dog needs to stop and smell a hydrant), but the Disney counter was always going.
Overall, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment, especially knowing that I had suffered a muscle strain during this training session, but I did not fracture anything and there was nothing physically stopping me this time from doing this. It had always been on my bucketlist to do a half marathon and I did it.