How Sean Astin Made me Run my Personal Best

OK, 80's Ladies, is there anyone who did NOT have a poster of Sean on their wall?  My heart still flutters a little as I think of Mikey sucking on that inhaler.  Or maybe that’s all the coffee I’ve had today.  So, I was really excited to get the opportunity to hear Sean speak at the Disneyland Half Marathon Fitness Expo last fall.  I like to hear the speakers at events such as this because I always gain some kind of insight or inspiration from them.  So, I certainly wasn’t going to miss Sean, and I think I secretly hoped he would give us the “Rudy" locker room speech.  We didn’t hear that, but he did say something that made me think about my run in a different way, and I credit him with my success that weekend.

As I mentioned before, I follow Jeff Galloway’s method (www.jeffgalloway.com) which involves run/walk intervals.  I used to think that if you were going to “run” a half marathon, you had to “run” the whole time but this is certainly not the case, and when I started running, I worked myself up to running for 10 minutes, and walking for 1 minute.  This gives you some recovery time, and it’s not like you stop moving!  So that is the only way I have been able to run.  Truthfully, at the start of the race, I tend to run the first 4 or 5 miles non-stop as I feel kind of foolish walking when everyone else is running around me, but that’s something I have to get over.

Anyway, last summer, I was having a really hard time improving on my overall time, and I had come to grips with the fact that I would not beat my personal best...until I heard Sean speak.  Keep in mind this was the DAY BEFORE my first race of the weekend, which is probably not a great time to rewrite the run script!  But Sean mentioned that at one point in his training, he decreased the length of his run intervals, so that he was taking walk breaks more often, and overall he found his time improve.  It was probably something I should have considered earlier than the day before a race.  I managed to talk to Jeff Galloway in person as well and asked him if he thought I should take more frequent walk intervals.  He looked at me like I had two heads when I told him the time I was hoping to improve on (it wasn’t a terrible time to begin with) but he said that, yes, research has shown more walk breaks improves overall time as the body doesn’t fatigue as quickly.  

So I reprogrammed my watch to a 5 minute run, 1 minute walk interval, for the 10K the following morning and had a great run!  And the following day, I maintained those intervals for the half marathon.  I demolished my previous personal best, placed 317 out of 15,979 runners and won a division award, in addition to the 4 medals I achieved that weekend.  

So, here is my piece of advice to all of you:  Always go to the fitness expo and listen to the speakers, whether it’s at the Queen City Marathon, or a celebrity at a RunDisney expo!  You never know what tidbit of information you will gain!

One other “Sean” story:  After the top photo was taken, he said, “Thanks for saying ‘Hi’, Canadian girl!”  To which I awkwardly looked at my shirt and my bag, for any marking to make him assume I was Canadian (after all, I'm fairly sure he didn't have MY poster hanging on his wall as a kid).  Nada.  I said “I don’t understand…how do you know I’m Canadian?”, and he replied, “How do you think I know??”  Awkward silence…

“Oh no, did I say, ‘Eh’??”, to which he laughed and said, “Of course you did!!"  

That’s our Mikey, still solving mysteries after all these years…