How It Started
In late December of 2007, Andrew and I were talking about running. I wanted to convince him to run the LA marathon and a marathon in Utah. He was resisting, but I didn’t take no for an answer.
Somehow the conversation shifted towards Elite Racing’s Rock ‘n Roll series of races. We were browsing their website when I noticed the link that showed the medals you earn for running more than one of their races in one calendar year. That’s all it took for me.
You see, if you run all 6 of their races in 2008, you will receive a medal in the shape of the Superman S with the number 6 below it. It stands for Super Six.
Well, being the avid Superman fan that I am, this instantly became my goal for 2008.
Andrew is the voice of reason and he tells me that we don’t have enough time to train for the first race. He hadn’t started training yet and I’d only began my training a week ago. The first race was a mere 2 1/2 weeks away.
But since when have I been accused of being reasonable? I mean, we’ve both run a full marathon and a half marathon in the past. That means we’ve at one point conditioned our bodies to endure long periods of pain and turmoil and pointless monotony regardless of common sense (I totally mean that in a good way). We’ve even went as far as brainwashing…I mean convincing ourselves it was fun. How bad could it be to pick up were we left off, right?
That’s when the idea of this blog came into being. Andrew and I have two different approaches to our running. We train differently and tackle the challenge of distance running with distinct approaches.
I make it a point to devote time to walking a portion of every mile. This may sound cautious, but I use my walking technique as a license to run greater distance with less training. In previous trainings, I’ve gone from a 10 mile long run, to a 14 mile long run the next week, and incremented it by 4 miles each consecutive week, until reaching 26 miles. Yes, I did run a full marathon in training.
Andrew runs the whole way and only stops to walk during water breaks. He takes all the water breaks. He also follows a plan of only adding 1 mile per week to his long runs. This means he needs to devote a longer period of time to training before a marathon to ensure he has enough time to get his long runs in. He doesn’t run the full 26 before the marathon. The most he’ll cover on a long training run is 18.
So in 2008, we’re going to journal our running experience on this blog. We’re not trying to prove which style is better. Truth be told, I wouldn’t recommend my style to people. I just think that my body can take it, and I thank God that I haven’t pushed it over it’s limit yet. The purpose of the blog is just to let you see what type of training, results and set backs go into distance running.
We both run for fun. That by itself categorizes us a fools. But we express and experience our running in unique ways. I plan on running in 8 races in 2008 and call it fun. Andrew will just be running for the sake of running and call it fun. Perchance he’ll join me in a race…perhaps not.
…either way, we’ll be 2 Running Fools.
–Joe
