Not only have I been putting on a few pounds over the last few years, I've also been pretty slothy. I've been thinking about how to rectify the situation, but I've been unable to come up with a good plan.
When I was younger, I used to go to the gym and lift weights at least 5 days a week. Of course, it was easier back then. My dad had a weight set in the basement, which I used a lot during high school. While as a student and an employee at Dalhousie University, a membership to Dalplex was included and was 60 seconds away. While living in Ottawa, I had to actually walk right past the gym to get to the office. I'm not exactly what you would call "dedicated", and history shows that I'm usually not willing to go through any sort of effort to actually get to the gym, which is really the only reason why I managed to get to the gym at all in the past. I once joined the Y, but it took 15 minutes to walk there. After a couple of cold mornings, I pretty much gave up.
I've been thinking about buying a Bowflex for several years, since if the equipment is in the house, I will definitely use it. They're pretty expensive though and, with all of the other things we needed to buy, it just was not possible to buy the Bowflex.
What to do, what to do....
About a year ago, a guy that I went to school with (and a former co-worker) was talking about his new-found love affair with endurance athletics. He spends his time training for ironman triathalons, and his website contains pictures of him participating and a blog describing his efforts. I went through the whole thing and decided that if he could do it, so could I. Well, at least some portion of it anyway. :)
I figured that training for and participating in a triathalon was probably a little too aggressive to attempt, at least for now. Financially and logistically, it would be rather difficult since I'd have to buy a bike and find a swimming pool (there are none anywhere around me). However, I did have a pair of sneakers, so I figured that I'd focus on the one component of the triathalon that was readily available to me.
I'm going to run a marathon.
As luck would have it, Halifax has it's own marathon - the Bluenose Marathon. The inaugural race was in 2004 and will be run again in May of 2005. So, armed with a pair of sneakers and a real timetable and goal, I began my training.
Not knowing anything about how to train for a marathon, I turned to the all-knowing, all-seeing Internet. My research led me here.
The site lays out a 26-week training schedule. Since I had lots of time to prepare, I started following the plan.
The pre-requisite for the plan is that you need to be able to run for a minimum of 30 minutes without stopping, and that's what I started working on. It took me a couple of months, but I did eventually make it and I then started working on the training schedule. And then two things happened....
By now, we're starting to get into October, so the days are getting shorter and the weather is starting to get a little colder. Things were also pretty busy at work. As you can probably guess, my training started to slide. Eventually I stopped altogether.
I spent a month considering how I was going to continue. I knew that I could run outside, but I really am a wuss and I don't like the cold. I considered getting a treadmill, but the money issue that kept me from buying a Bowflex continued to be an issue.
It was around this time that my employer indicated that the company would subsidize a gym membership. As it turns out, there is a Nubody's gym just up the street from my house and they have all kinds of treadmill equipment. It looked like things were going to get back on track for my training.
The gym membership plan wasn't going to kick in until the beginning of January, and having not done any running for 2 months and the May deadline fast approaching, I knew that I was not going to be able to continue following the 6-month plan.
The marathon was now a mere 5 months away and I knew that I was going to have to build myself back up to running 5 miles before I could even start the real training. I worked out a plan to get me built up again in 4 weeks, leaving only 16 weeks until the marathon. As luck would have it, I managed to find a 16-week training schedule here. The plan is aggressive and there's no room for setbacks or slacking, but I was confident that I could do it.
And now here we are, the end of February. I managed to get myself back up to 5 mile runs and I started the training schedule, right on time. Today I started week 5 of the schedule, which consisted of a 10-mile run. It's the furthest distance I've ever run or walked and while it just about killed me, I did it.
There's still a lot of work ahead of me, but with every successful run, I feel more and more confident in my ability to actually accomplish this goal. I will continue to share my trials and tribulations during this process.
- Mike
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