Chances are, if you are reading this, you already know at least a little bit about me already so I won't bore you with my life story. The purpose of this blog is to share my running and other fitness goals and progress. Things are changing rapidly in my life and I really want to be able to remember back to where I started and everything that happened along the way.
Okay, so now back to the winter of 2014. I was working on an agile development team on a very high profile project at Pioneer. Our team was moved into a former conference room where we sat at very small desks and worked elbow to elbow all day long which kind of forced us all to get cozy with one another. One morning one of those co-workers walked into the office and asked if anyone wanted to do a 5k training program with her. Quite honestly, I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking at the time, but I said that I would. I started from there and never looked back.
The early days of running could barely be called running. I remember my first time out, I made it running 2 blocks and had to walk the rest of the way. With that said, I very rarely missed a training run and over the course of 8 weeks I worked my way up to being able to run the entire distance. I didn't actually have a 5k race planned, but decided to run a 5k on my own on what was a very wet Sunday morning in April.
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| After a very wet 5k Run |
A few weeks later, my 2nd daughter, Bridget was born and life changed a little bit. I wasn't following a training program anymore, but I was still running each week. I wasn't as prepared as I would like to have been, but the last weekend of July I ran the Bix 7 in the Quad Cities. I was able to finish the race and I reached my goal of a 15:00 min/mi average.
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| Post Bix 7 |
I picked up my training a bit after the Bix and decided to run a 5k on my birthday and invited all of my Facebook friends to join me. I called it 5k for Patrick's 30th Birthday. Many friends and family members ran a 5k for me that week and I was joined by my sister-in-law and her future husband on my birthday to run a 5k of my own.
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| Ready to run on my 30th birthday |
My original plan was to try to run my first 1/2 marathon in October at the Des Moines Marathon. I still wasn't very comfortable with my running and I wasn't training as much as I wanted to so I opted to register for the 5k instead. I ended up running a PR 5k time that morning with a 13:25 min/mi average.
As we moved through the holidays, running became an after thought and it stayed that way throughout the winter. In early spring my wife, Erin, started to talk about her desire to run the Bix 7 that year. That is all it took to get me going again. I helped her to design a training program, and set my race schedule as well. I wanted to run the Dam to Dam half marathon on the last weekend of May but had a wedding to attend that day so it didn't work out. My first race ended up being the Grimes Governor's Days 5k and I was lucky enough to run it with my wife.
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| Erin and I post race |
At this point I had 3 months to increase my millage to run my first half marathon at the Quad Cities Marathon the last weekend of September. I also signed up to run my second half marathon 3 weeks later at the Des Moines Marathon. A lot of people said I was crazy, but I knew that I could do it. With the exception of a couple of weeks in June that I was travelling, my training was spot on. I rarely, if ever missed a training run and the miles added up quickly.
On Sunday, September 27 I ran in my first ever half marathon. Although my only true goal was to finish the race, leading up to race day, I figured I might be able to finish in under 3 hours. That is exactly what I did. My official time was 2:56:59 and I could not have been more excited.
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| First mile of the race |
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| 4 miles in |
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| My cheering section |
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| 9 miles in |
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| I did it! |
After a full week of rest I had 2 weeks of training until my next half marathon. I was very surprised at how much faster I was running during those 2 weeks. I actually had to hold myself back several times as I was really worried about injury. On Sunday, October 18th, I completed my second ever half marathon in Des Moines. It was the perfect morning for running! I blew away my time from just 3 weeks earlier and finished with an official time of 2:45:42, over 11 minutes faster then my first half marathon!
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| I did it again! |
I finished up the year with a 5 mile Turkey Trot in Davenport on Thanksgiving Day. I was happy to run it with my wife, especially because it was pouring rain the entire way. My goal was to average under 12:00 min/mi and we did! Even in conditions that were not ideal, we managed to run a 11:38 min/mi pace.
 Wearing matching shirts for the Turkey Trot |
So that is the cliff notes version of the past 2 years. Even more exciting things are going to happen this year, but to hear about it, you will have to check back for future blog posts.
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