The End of One Year Means the Beginning of Another

As my 2015 running season came to a close, I started to ponder what I should set for goals in 2016. I was certain that I wanted to run a marathon at some point, but things just didn't seem quite right for that yet. Sure, I had successfully trained and ran in 2 half marathons in 2015, but to an extent, I got lucky.

When I started training in April, I weighed in at just over 334 lbs, even though I was below 300 by the end of the year, that is a lot of weight to carry around on over 400 miles of training runs. I was lucky because I managed to not get injured. So at this point, I knew that if I wanted to run a marathon, I couldn't tempt fate again. I decided that I would spend 2016 trying to lose weight to train for my first marathon in 2017.

Of course nothing is that simple. The whole reason that I was losing weight in the first place was running. Now I was saying that I didn't want to overdo the running until I had lost more weight. I knew that I had to begin diversifying my workouts and that I would actually have to pay attention to my diet, not only to decrease the amount I was eating, but to also fuel my body properly for all of the training I would be doing.

Now that I knew what I needed to do, I had to figure out a way to stay motivated. Based on my experience over the past 2 years (see my previous blog post), I knew that signing up for races kept me motivated. So I started to pick various distance races to run throughout the year and my schedule ended up like this:

April: Drake Relays HyVee Road Races 10K
June: Dam to Dam half marathon
July: Bix 7
October: Des Moines Half Marathon OR Marathon Relay
November: Turkey Trot

I also planned to add a couple of more races with friends that includes taking a weekend trip to San Francisco to run with a high school friend and classmate. That certainly was enough to motivate me, but I decided to take it a step further and beginning working towards another dream of mine, to compete in a triathlon. I decided on the Des Moines Triathlon (sprint distance) that is held on Labor Day weekend in September. That would give me plenty of time to figure out how to swim and put plenty of miles on the bike.

No matter how much planning I do, something always seems to come up. As registration opened for the HyVee Road Races, they announced that they eliminated the 10k race this year. After doing some pondering, I decided to stick with my planned training program and run a 10k on my own that weekend instead.

Check back soon for an update on my training progress so far this year.