So I’ve been off the radar with my blog updates for what seems like a long time, but in reality it has only been a week.   Where has the time gone?    What have I been up to?   Well I will let you in on  little secret……

I’ve been running:)

The closer you get to your goal marathon (or at least this is true for me), the more pressure you have.   Not the pressure of training as with training it becomes more about the time.    The pressure of finding the time as the runs are longer.    It’s the pressure to find a few hours several days a week while doing everything else that needs to be done.

Under Pressure

When I first started my pretraining if you will.   I was running a few hours a week and now some of my runs are hours.

This does not allow for much down time.

The pressure to try to keep up the house.   Now, I’m not talking keep up the house so that you can eat off the floor.   I mean the pressure of getting all the things that need to be done done.

Laundry.   Grocery shopping.   Getting kids to activities.   Getting kids home from activities.   Feeding family, showering, ect, ect, ect.   You know the drill.

It is the pressure of doing all the things that need to be done actually done while maintaining a training schedule that requires more miles and more hours than when you came up with the brilliant idea of running a marathon.

That being said, I can see the silver lining.   I am almost to taper time.   It’s getting close.

The closer you get too, you have to realize that sometimes you sadly must realign things.   You must make choices about what you can and can’t do.    As my Coach has said to me, you must keep your eye on the prize.

Today, I should be running the Paine to Pain Trail Half Marathon.   I registered very early in the year and this was going to be an epic adventure for Dawn and me.   She did it last year and loved it.   We were going to do it together.   I had thought maybe I would still run it as a training run, but the closer it came to it the more I realized that it might not be the smartest thing for me to do right now.   Also the closer you get to your goal race, the more paranoid you get that you will twist an ankle or something (again at least me.).   So for this year, I had to give up my adventure with Dawn.

Although, I’m sure that she will still have an epic adventure!   She actually decided to become a sweeper for the race.   I can’t wait to hear all about it and am slightly sad that I am not there.   Truth be told though I did NOT miss the early wake up call:)   Dawn and I will have many more times for epic adventures and this was just not to be.

I am to the point in my training where I need to remember to enjoy the ride.   I’ve put in countless hours and countless miles (that’s not true I do keep track).   I feel as ready as I will ever be, but I have to not let the pressure trip me up.

How do you handle the pressure of training and life?