Last year a friend of mine asked me to sign up for the Brooklyn Half Marathon with him. Last week, they opened the lottery for the race and he reminded me to sign up. If picked, this would be my 9th race for this year. What am I doing? It’s only February. I thought I was going to start slowing down and retire a bit from long distance running but here my friends are dragging me into it. I ended up encouraging two of my coworkers to sign up too, while one of my other coworkers already has a guaranteed entry because he’s been a part of NYRR for years.
What is NYRR? As per their website, it is a non-profit running organization based in New York City whose mission is to help and inspire people through running. They organize a lot of the NYC running events, and most famously, the NYC marathon, which is the largest marathon in the world.
Here’s where it gets bad. I actually never had any ambitions of running the NYC marathon. I don’t know why, I guess it just didn’t appeal to me, since its my hometown city and I’m always in it anyway so I didn’t care to run around it when I already do run around in a different sense. I also never cared for it because I didn’t want to put in the work to quality for it. It’s a lot of work, waking up stupid early and attending 9 different race events, when the city is about an hour away from me. It’s a lot of travel for an early wake up time, especially 9 times. And then you also have to do at least one volunteer event for it. And then add to the fact that I just finished the Dopey and let’s be real, my first marathon was definitely eventful and a learning experience, one lesson which I learned was that 26.2 miles is NOT fun. A half is my distance. It’s challenging but still fun. I learned that around mile 10-11 is where I usually start to want to call it quits but I tell myself I can stick in it for another 5k to finish it out. But anything beyond that is absolutely unnecessary and torturous. Something about it, I just can’t explain but a full is brutal on you both physically and mentally. Your mind starts playing tricks on you during it and you just start to hate yourself. That said, after the Dopey, I had no ambitions of doing the Dopey again, it was a one and done.
Why am I talking about this? Because my same toxic friend who asked me to do the Brooklyn Half with him, I learned this weekend that his ultimate plan was actually to get me to qualify for the NYC Marathon with him for the 2023 course year. WTF. How did I get roped into this? I was trying to retire and stay at half marathon distances. Part of me is like I know you can do this, it’s hard but you’ve done it once before and the other part of me is saying yeah, exactly, it sucked, do you really want to go through this again? I know I can say no but knowing that this is his goal and he just wants a running buddy and he’s running it with a heart condition makes me feel like I shouldn’t have an excuse. I should suck it up and do this with him because I really don’t have a reason not to other than just being a bitchass. My coworker who runs the NYC Marathon annually like it’s his job has been telling me for years to do it. He wants me to run at least one of the world majors at least once in my lifetime, and his vote is always for NYC. A part of me has never wanted to do it honestly because of the fear of failure. I don’t want to try it and fail at it. It’d be wildly embarrassing. But now after finishing the Dopey, he really thinks I have no excuse and he’s not wrong. So I guess what this post is for is to hold myself accountable for setting up this new goal. I’m not entirely committed to it yet because of a lot of internal fears but at the same time, I definitely could see myself feeling proud for taking and completing a world major. Especially since one of of my before 40 goals was to complete a marathon and if I do this, it would be not only completing it, but putting 2 full marathons on my list of accomplishments. But I know this isn’t going to be easy. Training for Dopey was hard. Training for a marathon isn’t any easier. It’s a big commitment of time, giving up free weekends and free off days from work to train, to qualify and do all those 9 different race events, to make sure I not only train but also make sure my nutrition and everything else is on point. It’s a big commitment. It’s going to be hard. I don’t think a lot of people realize how hard it is to train for these things. The bulk of the work is literally the training. The race day is the easiest part. And if that’s the “easiest” part, then use that to try and picture how hard it is to train for it. They say this because race day is 26.2 miles. The training, which is anywhere from 3-6 months depending on how aggressive you choose to train, is hundreds of miles. For me, it was a total of 1240 miles racked up for Dopey training. It was A LOT. I stress this because I don't want to ever discredit the work put in. Every time you see a runner out there, you don't realize how much work they put in. It takes a lot of discipline to keep at it and commit to the training.
But I should stop using this as an excuse to not work towards this goal. I need to continue telling myself I can do hard things. No more excuses. Plus it fit alongside my timeline of finishing up bullshit by the end of next year. And honestly it would be a great way for me to keep in shape and not fall off the wagon. I find I do better when I have goals and a timeline set, in terms of my fitness. I hate when I don't have something to train for and thus no solid plan when I work out. It's just a roulette of workouts and it doesn't have any consistency, rhyme or reason because I'm just doing whatever I feel like instead of what’s needed for a set goal and deadline.
Welp. Here’s to becoming a New York Road Runner. Let’s go!
