My Running Story

This is my first post in a long time. Many things have come and gone...a whole semester of grad school (all A's, thank you!), a terrible season of UGA football, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and suddenly we're in 2011. All of it worth mentioning, but my favorite accomplishment/milestone this fall has been running my first half marathon this past October. This is my running story...

This past winter I had terrible shoulder pain which ended up requiring surgery to alleviate. I had to give up almost all my fitness that involved the upper body (swimming, weights, even the arms on the elliptical were difficult). So I started jogging, which I could do relatively easily without straining myself. I'd run a few 5K's before, but I've never been able to run more than 1/2 mile without having to stop and walk. So I signed up for the Winder Relay for Life "Hope for a Cure 5K" this past March and ran, with no training. I had a time of 34:00ish minutes, not great but not terrible. I walked a good bit of it.

After I had recovered from shoulder surgery enough to get out on the road again, I was itching to seriously train to run faster. I bought a Nike+ pedometer to measure my times and distances. It unit works with the iPod/iPhone and connects to a separate unit in your shoe. But the unit continuously needed calibrating and was never fully accurate; I'd run a 5K (3.1 miles) and it would only measure a run of 2.8-2.9 miles. So I traded it in for my Garmin GPS, which I wear on my wrist and enjoy immensely. It's turned out to be very accurate and has a lot of features that I don't use, but it's helpful when I'm switching from biking to running and vice versa.

I ran my first 10K in Madison this past May. This was 6.2 miles, a distance I'd never run all at once before this point. I remember being at the starting line and panicking that I'd never be able to finish all of it. My goal was to make it in an hour...I did an 1:07:00ish. Yuck. But I had a taste for running races, and it's addictive. I then decided to run the inaugural Athens Half Marathon taking place the end of October. Plenty of time to work up to 13.1 miles...

The end of May I found out I was pregnant. I kept on running, though, but decided not to sign up for the Half b/c I would have a sizable belly by then and would probably need to take it a little easy. When I lost the baby the first of July, everything changed. Running became kind of an escape for me, like I was running to punish myself. Not that it was my fault that we lost the baby or that running was the reason for the miscarriage, but it felt almost cathartic to sweat and pound the pavement through painful knees and ankles. I made the mistake of trying to run a race in the middle of July, two days after the physical miscarriage. My body was weak and swimming in hormones, and I fell to my knees after the second mile marker. I made it to the finish (pushing Nick in the stroller) but I told myself to never ignore what my body was trying to tell me.

The end of July I ran other 5K, a trail 5K at Fort Yargo state park, with a time of 33:12. The trails were hard to maneuver and it's difficult to pass other people on the narrow dirt passageways. I didn't let the time bother me.

One night I was running around the local high school (my favorite starting point) when I stepped off the curb weird and twisted my ankle. I was unable to train for several weeks, but ran another race in Flowery Branch soon after, limping almost the whole second half of the race. My time went down to 31:00ish, even with the bad ankle. I still wasn't listening to my body...
The next race in Buford, the Pound Out Polio 5K, I ran in 29:49, my best time yet! I was ecstatic about getting in under 30 minutes. (Robert still tells me that his students make fun of his T-shirt from that race. "Hey Mr. Turner, didn't they already cure polio?")

By Labor Day I was training exclusively for the Half Marathon on October 24th. I had a regimen of shorter run/walk exercises Mondays and Wednesday, a long run Thursday building up to the distance runs on Saturday. But three weeks before the Half my left knee went out. I could barely make one mile at a good pace without having to stop. So I rested...and rested...and never made it past 8 miles at my longest distance. I figured, what's another 5 miles if you've already run 8? It can't be that hard, right? I was going to find out one way or another...

The day of the Half, a Sunday, started out chilly. A couple thousand people crowded downtown Athens waiting for the start, some in trash bags over their running gear to keep warm, which they could throw off later when the race started. A novel idea I didn't think of...I was freezing. I had a goal of 2 hours 5 minutes.

The first four miles went very well; my knee hadn't given me a problem in a week so I wasn't worried. By mile 5 and 6 we were up on Milledge Avenue, and the pain started. Shooting from my hip down, my leg was on fire. But I was only halfway there, so I kept pushing...I remember praying to God to take the pain away from my leg.

By mile 8, the pain had turned to a manageable tingle. The grade was getting steeper as we climbed back up towards downtown Athens, crisscrossing through historic neighborhoods I'd never seen in all the years I'd lived there, and looping around behind Athens Regional Medical Center, an old employer. I looked in the crowd of scrub-clad people outside cheering us on for anyone I recognized but saw no one.

By mile 10, I was totally spent. Had to stop once to shed some layers and another time to use a port-o-potty (thank goodness for those!) Then came the killer: Mile 12 to mile marker 13 was an almost vertical climb up to the where the Classic Center sits downtown. I had to walk almost the whole mile, both my legs now numb from the knees down and my hip joint on fire. When I topped the hill I breathed a sigh of relief, for there was mile marker 13 and the finish line in sight at the bottom of the hill. The girl next to me and I decided to have a sprint down to the finish line...

Big mistake! I couldn't feel the lower half of my body, but it was moving faster than I'd ever known I could manage. I crossed the finish line as the announcer called my name and hometown over the loudspeaker. How embarrassing! Here I was trying not to pass out or have my legs buckle under me while everyone was staring...

But I did it! My time was a 2:12:ish (2 hours 12 minutes), not bad considering I had to stop and take a bathroom break during the race. My only regret is that no one in my family got the chance to see my run that day. My parents were in Moscow and Robert had a gig at another church. Next time I would love to have some cheering faces in the crowd who know me!

Would I do it again? Absolutely! In face, I've signed up for another half marathon this March 2011 in Atlanta, with the intention for training a little more efficiently this time. Since then I've run two more 5K with times of 29:59 and 27:17, and the Savannah Bridge Run 10K, with a time of 59:59. I'm in the best shape I've been in in years, my clothes all fit better, and I have a much more positive self image. I've gone from not being able to run a mile to running 13! Running has done remarkable things for me in the past year. My new goal is to run the Myrtle Beach FULL Marathon in February 2012! Gotta get moving!