Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Running on the Space Coast

Yesterday my running friend (and good friend outside of running) and I signed up for our first marathon together: the Space Coast marathon in Cocoa, FL. It's near the Kennedy Space Center and the event has, not surprisingly, a space theme. People dress up as astronauts and aliens, and there are photo ops with space shuttles, rockets, and the like. We said we wanted a fun run; this fit the bill. She's excited, I'm excited, we're excited.

The SCM is in 11 weeks. Yeah, we made our decision a little late, which explains why we will be going 15 miles for our first long run this weekend. We've already had several people inform us that we are crazy/overly optimistic/out of touch with reality. But whatever. It's 15 miles. It's doable, and not just for sponsored superhero athletes. For regular people like me, too. We choose to look at it as taking half a day to do an enjoyable training run in the great outdoors in a city we both love.

Here's our training schedule. We'll likely need to make some schedule-based modifications to the shorter runs, but we are determined to stick to the long runs, the longest mid-week run, and the Saturday run:


Today was 7 miles, and we KILLED that run. Killed it. She was keeping track of the distance; I wasn't. I was truly surprised when we hit our goal because although it was challenging (as most runs are for me), it was also a lot of fun, and the time passed quickly.

Did I mention that I'm really, really excited?

Aside from the opportunity to challenge ourselves and spend time in a beautiful part of the country, one other very important aspect of this - for me, anyway - is that I'll be running this with a friend. A FRIEND. MY FRIEND. Two years ago I didn't have any friends. Yes, I had kinda-sorta acquaintances, but that was about it. Running has been the best thing for providing an atmosphere, an environment, where I can be myself - where I don't have much choice BUT to be myself, because I'm usually too tired to think about self censorship. When I run with people, I feel so much like myself that I don't even think about myself. Does that make sense?

Plus, I love poop jokes, other runners usually love poop jokes... It's the perfect arena in which to find like-minded individuals.

Tomorrow: 4 miler!

2 comments:

  1. I saw that race at an expo booth, and they were handing out moon pies. Awesome! And the bling looked really cool. I am definitely having race envy right now. And you will be totally fine. You have a base, and you're getting in some good distances. My marathon isn't until Nov, and I am already itching to run. We have our third 20 miler on Saturday. Then two more after that. It just seems a little like overkill, but hopefully it works!:)

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  2. Yeah, we're excited about the bling, too. :-)

    I'm feeling decently confident about the whole thing. We've been running ~4-8 miles on average. Most of the time, both of us feel like we could easily keep going. I'm pumped about this challenge!

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