Fear of running

I had a really long day yesterday -- got to campus at 8 a.m. and didn't leave until 9:30 p.m. I had to eat all three meals there, and the third meal was more a few appetizers and dessert. I was "on" for a lot of the evening, so I sort of wore my socializing muscles out. I woke up this morning with a headache wanting to do nothing but sit and read magazines all day. I could barely make breakfast conversation with my husband, who was reading something aloud to me that sounded like a long string of facts and numbers. I couldn't even figure out what it was about so I finally told him what was up. He seemed to understand and stopped listing things. Plus I was dreading my run planned for today.

The half-marathon training plan I'm borrowing from has a range of miles, and today was a 12-14 mile run. I find it too hard to plan fixed-distance runs, so I just add a zero to the end of the mileage and do that number of minutes. I probably don't quite make the mileage range on these longer runs. My planned run for today was between 2 hours and 2 hours and 20 minutes.

That's a heck of a long run.

My fears ranged from the weird ("what if I break a leg?") to the not-so-weird ("what if I get halfway done, and can't make it back?"). I also had the headache to deal with. I did spend a little time in bed reading magazines after my husband left for cross-country practice, and then I decided to give it a try. The headache was better and I just wanted to get the run over with.

About 10 minutes in, I thought I might just do half an hour and call it a day. But I was listening to a "Speaking of Faith" podcast and there was something that made me think about whether I really needed to quit or whether I was just throwing in the towel because I was giving up because I was still afraid of how hard it was going to be. I decided it was the latter and kept going. I wanted to do at least 2 hours.

Toward the end of this run, every step was starting to hurt. I decided to call it quits at 2 hours, 10 minutes and walk the last 10 minutes. I have a few sore muscles now but other than that, I feel OK. It only took sitting and eating lunch for me to feel most of the way better. I plan to go for a short walk tonight to help loosen up the kinks a little.

I'm thinking that after this half marathon in October, I'm going to go back to training for shorter races for a while. I need some time to let running feel fun again.