Monday, December 29, 2008

I'm gonna run, run, run

Today I had what I like to call a breakthrough run. you see it's been more then a year since I've run seriously, and for the year before that I only ran when I had to. Meaning I only ran when the Marine Corps made me. But before that I was a fairly serious runner. I could log 7ish minute miles on a very good day, I'd run up to 50 miles a week. I started getting serious about running a marathon. So I trained, and it got interrupted with a depolyment, then started training again, deployment again. That's when I stopped running seriously.
Anyway, here I am at this small base in Afghanistan, not in good shape at all, haven't run much in forever, and today I decided to run a marathon. Well, I'm not going to run it today, of course but I want to run one. I setting my sights on September.
But this run I went on today, it's a tough run, and the only one out here really. It's a two mile course around the outside of the base. About 2/3 of it is uphill, and 1/3 is downhill. I've ran it a few times before and I've always had to stop running because it's just a tough run. I couldn't handle it. At first it was because I wasn't in good enough shape, then it became a mental issue, I just didn't have the drive to make it up this hill over a mile long.
Ah, but today was different. I started running on the downhill portion, where I always start. It was easy at first, which is typically a bad sign, because that usually means that I will crash in the end. But I kept going. And when it got tough, I kept going. I slowed waaaaaaay down, but I kept going. And I finished. It was only two miles, but it was a tough two miles. And it was a run that I haven't been able to complete before. I'm not too excited, because I may go out there tomorrow and completely fail, but now I know I can do it. And now I know I'm ready to start training.

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