Liz Trains for a Marathon: A New Reality

As I ran (6.5 miles, winding around a lake a few times) today, I was faced with a few... discoveries of reality:

• It's cold here: Yes, I'm sorry we're like twenty days into the winter and already I want the place to warm up a bit. (Attention Universe: That's not my way of asking for global warming.) If there was some way we could speed time up towards my trip to Florida and slow time down while I'm there, that would be acceptable.


• I haven't run 5 days a week yet: I only ran three days this week. I ran all the miles I was supposed to, but not all the days. It's easy to slap 3 miles onto whatever other run I'm doing at the moment. But there are going to be weeks where every run is 9 or 10 miles and there's no cheating on those weeks.


• I sleep like a bear in the winter: I've changed my arrival time at work to 10am. (You may now eat your heart out.) Even so, I haven't exercised in the morning, well, every day except Tuesday this week. I think it's related to my diet, not enough carbs for running six miles in the morning. I'm not quite sure yet.


• Every time I miss a run I feel like a failure: I was thinking (in all the free time I had running around the lake several times) that training for a marathon has made me feel like a failure sometimes when it should be doing just the opposite. Usually I feel like I can barely keep up with the training schedule (probably because my body wants to be asleep), and I feel like I'm missing runs, wondering if I'm going to actually do tomorrow's runs, and feeling bad about the whole thing. It's probably not the right outlook. I've run more this December and January than I did all of last winter. And I've run outside this December and January more than all the other year I've lived in Minnesota together probably. It's a real accomplishment. I just need to re-focus my attention on everything I have done.