Luuuuuuucy, I’m home!
Honestly, all of the training, the worry, and the blood, sweat and tears were worth it. I’ve been afraid to do a lot of things in my life, but I was pretty terrified to run this half marathon today. I was never a runner. In high school, I was that girl. The girl who complained about running the mile for gym class. During my freshman year of college, I could barely run for 30 seconds without having to stop and feeling like I was going to die. Then, over the next three years of college, I slowly started to get into running, and improve because we ran as cross training for swimming. Little by little, I loved it more and more, and by the end of my senior year, I was hooked. I loved to run, and I kept getting faster. I started training for this half marathon in March. And then, I got sick. I spent the end of April, May, June, and half of July sick and recovering from Mono, which then lead into a nasty case of double pneumonia. I was hospitalized for 6 days, lost 22 pounds, most of which was muscle, and most of my strength. Once the pneumonia finally cleared up, I found out that it had left a 2 inch hole in my lung. I thought that my days of being an athlete were over, and I definitely thought that running a half marathon was out of the question. That thought scared me enough to realize that I cared too much about it to let it slip between my fingers. So, I set my fears aside and got back out there and started running again. It wasn’t fast, but I was just happy to be back out there, doing what I loved, it no longer mattered how fast or slow my miles were. Inch by inch, I started getting ready for this race. In hind sight, I didn’t train for this nearly as much as I should have, but today I conquered a fear and accomplished a goal in one outrageous and hard fell swoop. It didn’t matter what my time was, what matters to me is that I ran it. And, I guess where I’m going with this is that you are capable of doing incredible things. Keep challenging yourself and never settle. You’ll always be glad you went the extra mile.