This month I will shoot for 30 miles per week and 3 days of P90x per week. I will not do a long run longer than 10 miles and will not cry if I don't make it to 30 miles per week. The base must be built but more important for me is I must be uninjured.
So was my goal for the month, obviously I am not posting this at the beginning of the month, but this is what I thought then. Which was the same time my wife said, "Are you actually going to sign up for a real race year." And so I got online and began searching, I have been into running for a year and a half now, focusing mostly on trail running and with my original goal to be to run an ultra distance on trails.
Spring of 2009 I was downsized and depressed. And despite what I considered to be my best efforts I couldn't run more than 3 miles without hurting something. And I wanted to run more, thought it would be a fun pure adventure. I even worked with a guy who had ran and completed Badwater 135. I honestly couldn't fathom running a race that long or that hot or hard. Truely insane, and I loved it and was jealous, so I thought, I bet I could do a 50k. Ran on and off, and kept getting hurt. Said it must be because of my old soccer knee injuries, and thought about buying a nice road bike and join the roadies. I don't know why but since my I moved to Oregon to be with my then fiancee in January of 2008, I got bite by the endurance sport bug, but hadn't yet found an adequate outlet.
Anywho, I got downsized at a dream job, and bummed out that I couldn't find any work and decided to take matters into my own hands. To set a goal for something that I thought was impossible but really wanted, and had a twinkle of maybe in my mind. Maybe I can run a 50k I thought. So after being inactive since I hurt my knee Freshman year in college on the soccer team, I decided to start running, and do what ever it took to run that distance.
All spring, I kept trying out new shoes and kept hurting my knee around the 3-5 mile range. Finally by Summer I started running a little everyday, for the first week it was .5 miles everyday. Week 2 it was 1 mile everyday. By the end of the first month I was up to 3 miles. By 3 months I found a job and quit running everyday but kept running, by the Fall (of 2009) I decided one day at work on a Friday, that I was bored and tomorrow I was going to run the entire Wildwood trail in Forest Park (31 miles, a 50k) and run to the beginning of the trail, so about 33 miles total. And I did it, and it was awesome. Then training was pretty lame on my part. No new goal, no real training, some running.
Early 2010 I decided I was going to run 60 miles on back roads when I went home to Door County, WI. Sounded easy enough till I went on my first real road run of 13 miles and felt my body want fall apart and decided to do another trail run. So I decided I was going to run in local park back home, Potawatomie State Park, for a good chunk of the day. Worked out pretty well it was about a 10k to run around the outside of the park. So ran about 40 miles and hurt my knee at about mile 30, that's what you get for not training.
So I needed a real goal and it was time to find a real race this Winter, my wife was right of course. I picked Pine to Palm 100 - mile Endurance Run, a.k.a. P2P, because it wasn't a part of a race series (I'm just not that competitive and didn't think that would be a fun environment for me), I didn't want to take somebody's spot who would care more than me about it (P2P is a new race, this will be the second year of it and it didn't sell out last year), and it is in Southern Oregon (a part of the state we have wanted to go to but havn't made it to yet, like many parts of the state).
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