Thoughts On The Eve Of My First Postpartum Marathon

It's been awhile since I blogged but with only a few days left until my first marathon post baby I thought it would be a good time to clear out the cobwebs so I'll have a place to write a proper post race report. I've been reading up on some of my past race reports this month leading up to race day and it's really nice to relive the emotions and details. I guess that's why this blog is still here.

I've not blogged in so long that it would be impossible to document everything that has happened since I last blogged...last summer. As I'm typing this, I realize how rusty I've gotten at banging these out. I'll attempt a short summary.

So last year (circa March 2015) right after my baby's first birthday, I decided to start running again. By the way, my "baby" is now almost two years old. This is him here. ^_^

Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, so I thought that if I could get into decent enough shape by September, which was when the 2016 Los Angeles Marathon registration opened up, that I would sign up and devote myself to an 18-week training program. My progress was slow but by summertime I felt confident enough to continue to ramp up mileage. When September rolled around, I was ready to commit so I signed up for my first postpartum marathon. This was early September. I spent most of September researching a new training plan so that when October rolled around I would be confident in my plan and ready to go. I'll see if I can find some time after my race to write a proper review of the plan I decided to go with. That is if it doesn't fail me this weekend. If it does, we'll never speak of it again. 

So I spent most of October, all of November, December, January until now deep in the trenches of training. If you follow me on Instagram you probably know all this already. With the exception of a couple of missed runs due to being ill, I've followed the training plan to a "T". I would really like to go more into details of my training so I'm hoping I will get a change to sit down later and reflect on those several months. 

This will be my 9th LA Marathon. I started in 2006, it was also my very first marathon. I didn't run in 2014 or 2015 due to my pregnancy and lazy-ness to sign up after I lost my streak. But life goes on and we will start another streak. 

So it's come down to today...four days until the big race. For the most part, I am ready. I came down with a bronchial infection late last week that landed me in urgent care over the weekend but I'm on the mends now so hopefully by race day all the medication and such will be out of my system and I'll be ready to go. At least that's what I'm planning on. 

My course PR for this current course is 4:08:08, I ran that in 2010. I haven't done as well in the years following mainly due to lack of training. I have to admit that I used to sign up for races just to experience them or sometimes just to get the bling. By the way, now I have a giant box of race bling that is heavy as f&#$ collecting dust in my garage. Food for thought? I think so. I never really took any of them seriously enough to commit to a training plan or disciplined myself enough to follow through with the training. It's kind of weird to hear myself say that in my head because at the time I thought I was so committed to each and every one of those races. 

I'll leave you with this collage that I've put together of all my runs that I posted on Instagram these past several months. It's only missing two days which I won't be able to include because they will happen tomorrow and Saturday but the rest is all here. In preparation for this race, I will have ran 97 days over the course of 18-weeks totaling 817 miles and boy are my legs tired. ^_~

Nothing left to do now but go out there and run marathon #24!!! Wish me luck!