Note to Myself as I Begin Training for My First Marathon

Dear Self,

I look back with amused irony that you were the girl in the eighth grade who wanted to lodge a complaint with the office that making us run a whole mile in gym class was cruel and unusual punishment. While you did do it, it was under extreme duress, you took most of the gym period to do it and if I remember correctly, you laid down on the grass more than once claiming you were dying. Yet here you are, mumble-mumble years later (it's not that I don't want to disclose how old I am, I just don't want to do the math) with three half-marathons and well over a thousand miles under your belt about to embark on one of your greatest challenges yet.

Me running my third half marathon.

 Tomorrow is the first day of your marathon training schedule and over the next four months, there are a few things I would like you to keep in mind.

• Tomorrow is the first day of your training plan. It is not the first day of your training. Every run since that first time you decided to try to run to the end of the block over two years ago has lead you to this point. 
• You will bork one of your long runs. You will probably bork more than one of them. That's okay. This is a learning process and every failed run will teach you something.
• There will be days where you won't want to do it, where you will want to do something else instead of go on your run. That's okay. Go run anyways.
• You may at some point resent the time the training takes. That's okay. It will be worth it.
• There will be a run that you will nail and make you feel like you can do anything. Don't forget about that one when you are running the crappy ones.
• Toenails grow back.
• If something happens and you can't run this race, that's okay.  There will be other races. If you don't run this marathon, you will run another.
• This is not the end of your running journey, just a stop along the way.
• Tapering will suck.
• You can do this, I know you can.

And then you can call yourself a marathoner.

Get out there and DO IT!!!

Love,
Me