full marathon?

I have been thinking long and hard about running in the Lincoln Marathon in May. It's a fairly flat course and ...I just can't stop thinking about running a full marathon. I almost feel like God has placed it on my heart to run - is that silly? Would He place a marathon on my heart? I don't know.

Since the thoughts won't leave my head (I dreamed about running last night a lot), I started to think about training plans. The one thing that scares me about running a full marathon (besides the 26.2 consecutive miles) is the training. It's such a time commitment; I know others who have much busier lives than I do that have trained, but I really like being with my husband and my kids. It's the 16, 18, 20 mile runs that are daunting - those are precious hours of my family time. How do you give that up?

Something I've toyed with but am unsure if it would work is to sort of train every other week. On the "off" weeks do cross training and weight lifting or even an easier run schedule. Then I could at least have every other week to do family stuff or just be together. I was just looking at the Hal Higdon's novice marathon training schedule, it's sort of like that. His week 11 goes: rest, 4, 8, 4, rest, 16, cross. Week 12 follows with: rest, 4, 8, 5, rest, 12, cross. Could I even make those "off" weeks even shorter "long" runs (8 perhaps?). I mean, I'm not trying to win a marathon, but finish (preferably within the 6 hour time limit a lot seem to have).

So much to think about...I do have the time, and for that I am thankful. I'm also thankful to have finished a 1/2 marathon - that's such an accomplishment in itself (that I couldn't have done without the Lord, trust me). Would you run a full or have you? How did you decide to take the leap?

Comments

Allie said…
I'm doing my first full in January, it was a lottery so I figured I might as well try to get in and turns out, I did. For me I knew we would be moving to Germany so I wanted to run a full before we left, I found myself really worrying about not winning the lotto. I knew then it was the right time for me to do a full.

I was worried about the time commitment with training also so I looked at a lot of different plans and ended up mashing two together to make mine. I opted for a 3 day a week schedule because I'm super paranoid about getting injured. I reach the halfway point in my training in two weeks and so far so good. Of course, the really long ones are coming up still.

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