Last night I told Tom that I was thinking that perhaps this would be my last half marathon. I was feeling tired. It's been quite the healing odyssey these past 10+ years and I have always set my sights on goals that would challenge me. Tom told me that I could let him know if a threepeat of the Bermuda Half Marathon was too much for me now.
I knew that I needed to go the distance at least one more time!
I had a good night's sleep. I woke up feeling completely recovered from last week's training. Did I want to go through the pain of another week of training working towards the goal of another 13.1 mile race?
We did our core work and had a great breakfast. We worked as a Team getting everything ready for our 8.5 mile run. We were going to do 9 miles but decided we needed to do a second week at 8.5 miles since we were ahead of last year's training schedule.
We planned to do our same route as last week; twice around the big Reservoir at Cleveland Circle and 3 times around the small Reservoir on Route 9 near our home.
En route to the Reservoir we all wondered if we wanted to change things up but with a cloudless blue sky, sunshine and the expanse of the Reservoir, we decided to stay the course ... until there was a 5K happening at the Reservoir.
We decided that we would do an out and back run on Beacon Street but first we would have to calculate how far down Beacon Street we needed to go as we paused our run. There was much disagreement about how we were doing the math. My gut told me something was off and Ruth Anne voiced her concern about how Tom calculated the distance. By the way, as an aside, this is fairly typical for Team McManus on training runs!
We decided that we would go with Tom's calculations. We took on the challenge of all the hills on Beacon Street while also reminiscing about our 2009 Boston Marathon run especially as we got to the Citgo Sign in Kenmore Square.
At 4.77 miles we turned around. We made a pit stop at Marathon Sports and quickly realized that we had miscalculated the mileage.
We were trying to figure out how/if we could make a correction at that point.
We decided that all we could do was to go straight up the hill at Chestnut Hill Avenue to home after reaching Cleveland Circle.
By the time we arrived at our home where we originated our run from we had run 8.95 miles.
As you can see from our smiles we were feeling very accomplished.
Only 4 more miles and we have the half marathon distance!
The course we ran today was more hilly than the course in Bermuda. We had to push ourselves beyond what we planned for our distance.
It was quite the happy accident for me!
This won't be my last Half Marathon....
I realized how healthy and strong I am. By challenging myself with an annual Half Marathon and working hard in the off season I continue to heal the effects of paralytic polio and trauma that manifested as the diagnosis of Post Polio Syndrome, a progressive neuromuscular disease by Western Medicine standards in December of 2006.
Sure comfort and ease feels good because, well it's comfort and ease.
But as Helen Keller said:
and one of my all time favorite quotes:
Accidentally running almost 9 miles today shook me out of my doubts about going the distance for a threepeat of the 2018 Bermuda Half Marathon. I realize how far I've come in these past 10+ years. As we ran along the Boston Marathon course I realized how my mind and Spirit carried me through those 26.2 miles. Staying connected to the Divine, believing that I could and would run the 2009 Boston Marathon guided my body to respond to the challenge.
And today - I felt the hand of God on our training run in a miscalculation of our mileage...almost nine is indeed simply Divine.
Go the distance with strength and courage!
~Mary
Be sure to visit my website by following this link.
My books are available on Amazon.
Feel the Heal: An Anthology of Poems to Heal Your Life
Coming Home: A Memoir of Healing Hope and Possibility that chronicles the first 7 years of my healing journey:
And my latest and greatest book - Going the Distance: The Power of Endurance (With a Foreword by Jacqueline Hansen):
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