Sundays are not Fun-days

They are my Long Run Days, because well… you see…

I’m finally training for a marathon. I say ‘finally’ because I’ve only been entertaining this idea for two years. No! More than two years. Since January of 2008 when Dorian ran the Disney Marathon with his dad and Shane, I’ve been fiddling around with a growing interest in whether or not I could do that too. Would I have what it takes to run a marathon. Twenty six point two miles. On foot. On purpose! Was it something that I actually even wanted to do?! I didn’t know. So fiddle with the idea, I did.

Alisa said to me once (when I was having one of my many freak outs about what it would be like to actually kiss my best friend–one of the sole reasons it took me so long to declare my relationship with Dorian official… because Heaven knows there’s no WAY I’m kissing without committment–which led me to freak out about ‘why-in-the-world-is-the-idea-of-kissing-someone-I-care-so-much-about-so-SCARY’), that if I wasn’t freaking out about something or examining the possible outcomes from every angle or having doubts in general that she knew it was not something that I really, truly cared about. She said that in the time she’d known me, I’d been incapable of making any kind of decision without spending an obnoxiously careful amount of time weighing the options. She said, “Kristen, you can’t even switch shampoo without getting five different opinions.”

And so it has been with the decision of whether or not to run a marathon. Would it be something that I was even capable of doing? Would the training be something that I was willing to commit to? I knew that if I was going to do this, I was going to do it 100%, refusing to hold anything back. I knew that I would want to be able to reach the finish line knowing that I’d given everything I could. And I knew that ‘giving everything I could’ involved so much more than the actual day of the marathon.

At one point, we questioned if me running a marathon would require sacrificing the long-term health of my knees. The jury is still out on that point, honestly. But what it came down to was that that is a bridget that we will cross if we ever get there. Ultimately, the pros far outweighed the cons. The major con is that possibly, one day down the road, my knees will be worse for the wear and may require surgery. But who’s to say that the marathon would be the number one cause of that? Will it add to it? I wouldn’t doubt it, yes. But so will many other choices that I’ve made when it comes to our fitness endeavors. And is fitness something that I’m willing to negotiate? Absolutely not.

But the pros? Ohhhh, the pros! The pros of diligently spending the next 6 months training, of dedicating my focus to running when I would have been working out anyways, of striving for something that is so overwhelming it almost doesn’t seem possible… The pros of that? Would be to crush the self doubt and loathing that I allow to set up camp in my daily thought processes. The pros would be to drown those thoughts with a rushing current of adrenaline and sense of completion. The pros will be to look back on all these months of blood, sweat and tears wondering all along if I’d be able to make it and know that, yes. YES I CAN.

And those pros? Those pros make every blister, every callous, every black & blue nail and every drop of sweat (which, incidentally? Could probably fill Lake Michigan by this point) absolutely, 100% WORTH IT.