"Body, if you get me through this I promise to never do this to you again..."

I am a very impulsive person, which gets me in trouble a lot. I don't think about the consequences of my actions most of the time and just do what I feel like doing at that moment. This past Spring I decided that I had nothing to work toward (a bad predicament to find myself in). I signed myself up for a half-marathon in Hickory because I thought it wouldn't be too bad (I'd run more than 13 miles at once before) and I had been telling myself I would do one for some time. My mom freaked out when I signed myself up telling me I would injure myself again and that Hickory was too far away and I should find something closer. Well I'm also very stubborn and won't listen to reason when I have my mind made up about something. I signed up and kind of forgot about it because it was a few months away.

After I finished exams and realized i hadn't run in over a week and had a half-marathon to run in a month, i hit the pavement. I ran almost everyday everywhere. I explored neighborhoods to potentially live in by running past. I also discovered a mental hospital in a place that was very surprising. The day of my half marathon crept up pretty fast and I felt as prepared as I was going to be.

What I know now, I was not ready for this thing (the whole experience). We checked into our hotel in Hickory, got food, and were going to look for the start of the race (somewhere in downtown) so we wouldn't be lost at 6 in the morning. After spending an hour driving around Hickory (I lost the map of Hickory they had given me) and being bitched out the entire time for losing the map and having my parents berate me about how I was going to get lost everywhere I went and that I would get raped in New York and kidnapped abroad, etc. etc., we managed to find the start and our way back to our hotel room. I forced myself and my parents to go to bed at 9pm, so I could wake up at 5 am and feel well rested. One slight problem: I don't go to bed ever at 9pm, I normally go to bed sometime after midnight. A bigger problem: The room next door was throwing a loud party and our side of the hotel faced a major road where everyone decided to rev their engines and drag race. Then the worst thing happened: my dad started snoring, loudly. Every time I got up to get ear plugs (they had provided them for us at this hotel), my dad stopped snoring. I was also paranoid that if I put the ear plugs in I would oversleep and not hear my alarm. (I didn't trust my parents to wake up.)

I got up at 5am, ate a quick breakfast, began downing fluid, and vaselined my feet to avoid blisters. I got to the race at 6:15, attached the timing chip to my shoe and walked around looking at all the people I would be racing against. I haven't raced since high school and a 5k or track race is very different from a half marathon. The people I saw where drinking coffee (a big no-no for any type of race) and listening to their iPOds. I refused to wear my mp3 player because I feel that music while your running helps you run faster and longer (it helps block out some of the pain your feeling by distracting you and it gives you a beat to keep up with). At the start I felt good, a bit nervous but not too bad. The race started fine, I was up with the second to top group of runners at the start and felt fine. It was into the first mile that I ended up beside a woman who sounded like she was about to pop out a baby. Her breathing sounded like this "hee-hee, haw-haw" and it was loud. At once I thought I heard her say "hello" and another time "water", but I was never sure. All I knew was I had to get the hell away from her because I could not run 13 miles listening to that. I lost her after the third mile, but endured her for 24 minutes. My downfall I'd have to say in this race is that I ran too fast at the start. My first mile was under 7 minutes, with many of the proceeding miles around 8 minutes. I made it to mile 6 and then mile 7 without too much difficulty. At mile 7 I started feeling bad. I got a throbbing pain up my right leg. It started in my foot and went all the way up to my butt. I kept telling myself to keep going that I was 3 miles from mile 10 and that was 3 miles to the end. (I know some motivation, hey body you only have 6 miles left-it sounds impossibly long). Around mile 8, some man decided to smartly read the writing on my shirt and the back of my shirt. Just the smug way he said it made me want to flick him off, but I resisted. I have this bad habit of being very mean to people who cheer for me in races. I've gotten better, I like it when they cheer in long distance races now, hurdle races, etc., but if I was still high jumping, I would go off on anyone who made a noise while I was attempting a height. I needed all my concentration for high jumping and the noise was too distracting (I would envision myself clearing the bar and jumping perfectly: perfect j-curve, left foot plant, jump straight up, lifting arms straight up, bending head, neck, back into a perfect arch, and then immediately kicking my legs up so they wouldn't hit the bar and ruin my jump-a lot to think about just that happens in a few seconds). Anyway this guy was not going to get to me, so I just shook my head and kept going. Another annoyance I encountered around this time was the realization that my butt was bouncing around and it felt like it was slowing me down. I have had a love-hate relationship with my butt. While competing in high school and at that moment I hated it. It slowed me down in cross country and it was terrible for high jump. I couldn't lift my hips high enough to get my butt high enough to clear the bar. If I had no butt I could have cleared 3-4 more inches easily. And now it was bouncing around and just being a pain. If I could have cut off my butt to shed some extra weight to make me more aerodynamic then I would have.

Mile 9 passed the start and finish area and took you past Lenoir-Rhyne college. By this point I was cold for some reason and my body was tingling. Probably not a good sign. I knew I had to stop running if I stopped sweating, but I didn't know what to do if I felt like this. I decided to keep going because at this point I didn't care what time or what place I finished I just wanted to finish without ever walking. After mile 11 things went uphill, literally. The last two miles of the course were uphill. I thought I was going to die, right there, but I was so close. "Body, if you get me through this I promise to never put you through this again, no more half marathons." This really had no effect on my running, but maybe it would help me finish strong. After mile 12 I kept myself going by thinking "You are less than a mile from finishing, come on you can do it." I ran up hill after hill, hoping that the finish would be around the corner. Eventually it was around the corner and I began to speed up. (I love finishing fast, I sprint in, no matter how tired I am). I beat 2 people from my sprint alone (one happened to be a little boy half my height who I didn't even see beside me). No matter, I finished, I had finished a half marathon!!

Even though it was tough and I was beaten by 158 other people. I finished 159 overall, 5th in my age group thought (20-24) and had a 73 yr old man beat me (he looked like all he ever did was run to be fair). And never again will I sign my body up for another half marathon...well at least that's what I told my body.