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In 2007, I challenged myself to run a marathon. I had been a runner most of my Navy career (and even then, was already feeling the gnawing pain in my hips that later led to their complete replacement) but this was different.
My wife who had already run a few marathons agreed to let me train with her for the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC. She did tell me that training for a marathon was difficult and different than anything I’d done before.
She was right. We set a training regimen that ended a week before the actual marathon in November and worked backwards from that. I did three-mile runs every other day and then on Sunday we did a longer one that increased by one mile each week. Once we got to 10 miles, we would run 11 the next Sunday, and then back to 10 the following week, BUT 12 the next week. This continued until we got to 24 miles. When I could run 24, I knew I could gut out 26.2.
We also did a few tune-up runs. A couple of 5Ks, The Army 10-Miler, and even the Virginia Beach Rock & Roll Half Marathon over Labor Day weekend.
That was a hell of a lot of running! More than I had ever done before. And I still hadn’t done the actual marathon! The training paid off as I finished with a respectable time measured with a stopwatch, not a calendar.
There is a certain pride you experience when you accomplish something big. I enjoyed telling people I ran a marathon and to see their pained expression as they admitted “I could never do that.”
But had I not made some big changes to my training routine, I wouldn’t have been able to either.
I’m sure you have a few big goals you’ve silently entertained. These could be bucket list items or simply things to give you some bragging rights. But the bigger these are, the more hard things might need to be done. Just like I trained different and harder all those years ago for the right to say I’m a marathoner, you might have to do something equally as difficult.
What will you tackle this year?
What hard thing will you need to do?
What big changes will you need to make?