Announcement...

Sometime in March, I was on a morning run and I realized... holy shit... I'm 33! My age is just not something that I'm aware of on a day-to-day basis. And for the most part, that's fine. Who cares... age is just a number. But, I also kind of consider the age of 35 to be a benchmark age and back when I was 30 or so, I made some goals of myself to have accomplished by the time I was 35.

Goals like.... climb Mt. Kilimanjaro by the time I'm 35. (Which... uhhh... guess I need to get on that, too). But the goal that really caught me off guard on that morning run was my goal to qualify for the Boston Marathon in every age group. Which means... ummm... I have to qualify sometime next year. YOWZA!

So, I ran home and immediately emailed my Coach and was like... "heh.... I know this is crazy and I know I'm in the middle of training for Eugene and I know that knocking 20 minutes off my marathon time is going to take some serious effort... but, uhhh... I kinda need to BQ next year, m'kay? Thanks."

After my first marathon, BQing was my #1 goal. And then I ran a few other marathons and realized how humbling marathons really are and how soul crushing not meeting your goal can be, so I shelved that goal for.... sometime before I'm 35. Well.. my sometime is running out.

I know, you're sitting there reading this thinking... wow... 20 minutes in one year... are you NUTS? And yeah, I am and I'm also scared shitless about it. Scared about the training, scared about attempting the marathons, scared about failing. I mean, I think it's pretty safe to say at this point, that the marathon has not really proven to be my "racing distance." But, on the flipside, I'm also excited. I'm excited to figure out how to do it, I'm excited to train and push my body, excited to send Coach and The KoB a dozen emails a day freaking about workouts, etc. But mostly just excited to do it.

I'm running a race this weekend and then after that I will start to train for an early September marathon. That will probably not be a huge goal race, but serve mainly as motivation for training during the summer and keeping in shape. A PR would be nice there and I will likely shoot for that, though.

My projected path is to run that race and then another race in December... with the hopes of shaving time off my PR and getting a little closer to 3:34:59. And then run a couple of races next year (before the September BAA deadline) and hopefully get my BQ. That would mean that I would qualify as a 34 year old and run it as a 35 year old. Perfect!

It's going to be really hard and take me out of my comfort zone, physically and mentally (an 8:12 pace for a marathon? W.T.F?). but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

I'm sorry. I'm clearly addicted to gifs.

I expect an intervention any day now.