Breaking Personal Best's!

I am running in the Campus to Campus Half Marathon on March 28. That's 13 days away, and on February 28 I strained a muscle in my lower leg. Other than a horribly painful 4km run/4 km walk I didn't run for 12 days. Then I fixed my bike and I'm easing my way back into exercising in the hopes that I will be fully healed by the time the race comes around. I told a friend, who knew about my injury, that I intended to break my personal best for the half marathon distance. His reaction seemed to be rather incredulous, telling me I was nuts. To which my reaction was;

"I would rather live a life pushing myself to the limits with reckless abandon than to sit around cautiously waiting for my body to heal".

On March 28th I will break my personal best for a half marathon of 1:44:58. I set this personal best three and a half years ago in the first race that I entered. When I ran this race I never trained with a fancy GPS wristwatch like I do now, I just ran. I didn't worry about how fast I was pacing when I trained, I just tried to keep up with my mother's dog who ran a hell of a lot faster than I did. During the race where I set my personal best I was running for myself, I didn`t think about anything negative during the race, I had no stupid thoughts in my head. And boy did I ever run faster than I should have been capable in the last 5 k of that race. I will do it all again in two weeks.



This was me in that race. Drenched with sweat the way I should be at the end of a race. I wore those same shorts while running today. And quite disturbingly I the shoes I was wearing in that picture haven`t yet hit the garbage bin. Perhaps I will take them to the store and buy an identical pair for good luck.

It is truly amazing how one`s body and physical abilities are affected by lack of happiness and stress. Very soon after that race I allowed my life to be led down a path that I shouldn`t have gone down. I was unhappy, making life decisions based on trying to please other people and ignoring my own wants, and I was getting fat. The last two years Campus to Campus half marathons have been times of 2:23:24 in 2008 and 2:12:59 in 2009. Only a year and a half after I ran a half marathon in under 1:45 I took 38 minutes longer to do it. One minute extra for every pound I added to my body through unhappiness.



This was me at the end of the 2008 Campus to Campus. You can see the fat around my belly. The shorts that I wore in 2006, and that I wear now... they didn`t fit me then I had got too big, I wore stretchy waist band shorts. You can see the look of disappointment on my face. The registration form for that race had a section asking for your expected finish time. I put down 2 hours, I figured even though I wasn`t in that good shape surely I couldn`t do that much worse than I had before. When I was crossing the finish line the announcer called out my name, and he said `just a little bit off of his goal time of 2 hours` ouch.

Since the 2009 Campus to Campus I have done a lot of running and biking. And I enjoy it again. I have run a sub 4 hour marathon, and the last race I ran in I ran at a sub 5:00 min per km pace. In total since the 2009 race last year I have run 1315 km and biked 1110 km. I feel great, I feel ready, and I am going to beat 1:45 in the half marathon, hopefully even 1:40.

Reckless abandon in pursuit of physical pleasures is super duper!

Keep on running... or biking.

Nazzer