Part III: The long (distance) road ahead
This brings us to today January 7th 2018. Rebecca is no longer a 1500/mile runner. She’s going to be an emergency medicine physician and she is getting ready to embark on the rest of life’s adventures and have a real job (finally).
By the end of the month I will have finished my last 2 interviews and will be back to running 50 miles a week for the first time in at least 6 months. Why? You heard it here first and I am putting it down on paper now for the world to see (and laugh at from time to time with me), I am getting up to 50+ miles a week again as the base for racing the Indy Mini Marathon on my graduation weekend on May 5th. Just so were clear this is a half, 13.1, hence ‘mini’ marathon. I’m only half crazy. I haven’t completely converted over to the dark side, yet.
After a year of wrestling with where to go with my running, I have found that I still love to race and I still love to make myself dive into that hurt well and pull myself out again, but I need to find somewhere new to do it. Somewhere that involves slightly less pre-planning, access to tracks, and commute time and the roads are that place for me. I experimented with road races as I traveled around the Midwest for rotations and it was just fun to put myself back out there again. No super big goals in mind, just pushing myself to chase the boys and beat some people again. I wanted a new challenge and well the half is so far out of my comfort zone that it’s perfect, because I can spend the next however long it takes making myself into a whole new runner. And more importantly get back to what I loved so much about the 1500 - the crazy ass journey that it took me on. It’s time for a new journey as an EM resident and half marathon runner.
2018 is a whole new starting line.