For as long as I can remember, I hated running. In middle school I quit soccer because the coach kept putting me in midfield and I couldn’t stand lapping the field all game. When my mom made me join the track team, I chose the long jump as my event because it involved the least running. At practices, I walked the warm up lap, convinced that if I ran so much as a quarter mile I might just die.
Fast forward to this November, I ran my first half marathon and I’m pretty sure I killed that little girl inside of me who hated to run, or at the very least bewildered her into silence. I sort of accidentally fell in love with running. All throughout high school, I lifted weights as training for competitive alpine ski racing, and in college, the gym became just about my only personality trait. But the moment I was no longer training for something, my only purpose in the gym was to look perfect and it made me miserable. Eventually, all that pressure and self-loathing became too much to bear, so during the summer of 2022, I quit lifting.
Something that is probably worth mentioning is my parents are exercise fanatics. The second I turned 9, old enough to use the YMCA weight room with proper training, I was joining my mom for after-school workouts and early-morning bootcamp training. So it’s probably their fault that when I quit lifting, I couldn’t quit exercising — I was addicted.
I had done incline walking cardio sessions as a post-lift cool down, so when my lifting career was over, I quickly became a 12:3:30 treadmill junky. For those who aren’t on fitness social media threads, 12:3:30 is a viral cardio workout consisting of 30 minutes of walking at an incline of 12 and speed of three. As my endurance base grew throughout the summer of 2022, incline walking was no longer enough of a challenge. I found myself tinkering with the speed on my treadmill until one day, I was running.
The first year that I got into running, I still hated it. I was running inconsistently a few times a week on the treadmill and sprinkling in a few light weightlifting sessions. But nine times out of 10, when I had a run scheduled for my workout, I dreaded it. It wasn’t until I got off the treadmill and began running outside that I began to understand the appeal. But still, I wasn’t doing it enough to get past the beginner phase of it just being hard.
Last summer, when I was studying abroad in London, I grew out of my beginner phase. I no longer had access to a weight room, so I committed to running nearly every day. Months before, three miles at a 10:30 pace was a challenge but, after a few weeks of consistency, I was gliding through six miles at a 9:30 pace and actually enjoying it. That was when I decided to sign up for a half marathon.
The first step to committing to an endurance race is telling everyone you’re committing to an endurance race, that way even if you want to, you can’t back out. So the first thing I did to finalize my decision was call my parents, my biggest fitness cheerleaders, and tell them, “When I get home from Europe, I’m training for a half marathon.”
The original plan was to run the Eugene half marathon in the spring. But three weeks into a 30-week training block, my long runs had already broken eight miles, so I decided spring was not soon enough. I discovered the Run To Stay Warm half marathon through a friend who was also racing it — thank you to our very own health reporter Lauren Englet — and signed up immediately. Just like that, a goal that was far away in some imagined future was approaching in less than a month.
Training for the half was honestly pretty easy. I found myself getting away with skipping workouts and putting off long runs because I was still making insane progress. My pace was getting faster every run and I felt amazing. A week before race day, I began toying with the idea of running a full marathon. I rationalized that if I ran the Eugene marathon, then really the half would be only a little step in the grand process of marathon training.
Maybe I was only considering signing up for a marathon to calm my nerves about the half I was about to run. But about 11 miles into my race, as my hamstrings cramped and every step hurt more than the last, I began to doubt if 26.2 miles was something I could ever tackle. When I crossed the finish line, the first words out of my mouth were, “I am NOT running a whole marathon.” 24 hours later, I signed up for the Eugene marathon.
My friends have told me I’m crazy, even my exercise-fanatic mom shook her head and laughed when I showed her my sign-up receipt. “You’re a glutton for punishment,” she said. From where I’m standing, it might be terrifying as hell, but running a marathon is not crazy — it’s just the next logical step.
My first long run in half marathon training was 7 miles, about half of the race distance, and it felt like the hardest thing I had ever done. But 10 weeks and a lot of running later, the first seven miles of my race were so easy I would even call them fun. With that logic, if 13.1 miles is currently the hardest thing I’ve ever done, then 20 weeks of training down the line it will feel like 7 feels to me now — easy and fun.
I should mention, the hardest part of running a marathon is not running a marathon — it’s training for a marathon. For the next 20 weeks, I will be giving up alcohol, leisurely Saturdays and sleeping past 8 am in preparation to run 26.2 miles. A few years ago, you would have been hard pressed to get me to run one. So why am I running a marathon? I guess the only reason is because I can.
During half marathon training, proving myself wrong each week that yes, I can be a runner, was the greatest thing I had ever done. I don’t want to give up the thrill of finishing my long runs each week and saying, “This is the farthest I have ever run.” I want to continue feeling stronger, faster and mentally tougher. But of course, it’s not all highs. For the most part, training is hard, logistical and humbling. Most of all, for someone who is not an athlete, it can feel purposeless. So for the next 20 weeks this column will be my purpose. I will be tracking my progress, both physically and mentally, and sharing every little detail of how I train. Come run a marathon with me.
