195 Days of Self-Doubt & Fear

The big day has come…the first day of training for the Walt Disney World Marathon!! (I can’t decide if the exclamation points should be in there or not)  I have been holding on to my post-race “snack” from my last RunDisney race for this day, so even though it expired in December, I’m going to crack into that to try and get myself motivated!  I already feel nauseous over the whole thing, so surely it can’t get any worse.

The training program is 28 weeks long, which also means the Marathon is 195 days away.  The good news is, my mystery injury has improved a little bit.  So now when I run, instead of looking like a kill-deer faking an injury to lure a predator away from her nest, I just look like an old lady who is far too out of shape to be running.  I consider this a win!  The bad news is, I have very little confidence in myself that I can do this.  Quite frankly, I’m not sure I will be ready for the Queen City HALF Marathon in September.  

Looking through the training program, I will try to do as many real “races” as possible if they coincide with my training days.  For example, the Estevan Police Half Marathon falls on October 4 and I am scheduled for a 15 mile run that weekend anyway, so I will do that.  It is always a little easier to run during a formal race, that just around my route as I described in an earlier post.  Of course, how I’m going to run past the BBQ tent at the end of the Estevan race to run another 2 miles and meet my training goal, I have no idea.   I am fairly confident in being able to get my mileage in until the first part of November.  And then I’m going to have some trouble.  In November and December I have a couple of big runs on the schedule and I am NOT doing those on the treadmill.  I am seriously considering showing up on the doorstep of some warmer-weathered friends on these days and asking them to point me in the direction of a running trail.  Seriously considering it…so if this idea scares you, you might not want to answer the door.  But ideally, if I can get some kind of guarantee that we won’t have snow in Saskatchewan until Christmas Day, I’ll be all good!  That isn't too much to ask, is it?

In the meantime, the training starts out very slow, so I should be able to keep up for the first few weeks.  I have just submitted my proof of time to RunDisney and based on that, they have calculated my anticipated 26.2 mile finish time as 3 hours, 39 minutes. Oh that Mickey, he always did like a good laugh!