7/19/2012 A Little Side Note

Let's just get this out of the way early. An admission of sorts. I hate running. A lot. I ran track in high school. I was pretty awful. Out of 2 years of track, I think there was one race that I didn't come in last. I ran the 1600 and the 3200, also known as the mile and 2 mile. I was slow, but being uncoordinated and not having an athletic bone in my body, it gave me something to do, and a chance to be involved. After 2 years of high school track, it was literally years before I started running again. Years as in over a decade. It was last summer that an online friend tempted me, and got me running again. I watched my friend P complete the 2011 Disney Princess Half Marathon while pregnant. I so wanted to do that! I love Disney. If I ever win the lottery, we are buying a house(a big house) in Florida where I can spend all of my free time at Disney. And as a lottery winner, I will have lots of free time. Back on track. I got to running, with the goal in mind of doing the Princess Half this year. And by the end of summer, I lost all of my mojo(on top of my milk supply). I got burnt out and never registered. And that didn't bother me at all. Until the Princess Half rolled around. And I literally had to hide P on Facebook over that long weekend, because I was so jealous watching her experience everything. She even got an upgrade to the Polynesian resort, the one resort I have been dying to stay at since I first stepped foot on Disney property over 5 years ago. This was a sign. The universe's way of saying "See? You should have stuck with it." So with no excuses this summer other than laziness and my hatred of running(which aren't very good excuses), I made the decision to stick with it and commit to doing this next year. And now I'm training. I'm not even training hard yet. I've done no more than 3.5 miles at one time. I will admit that considering at this point last month I hadn't even started running, and was only doing Zumba once a week, so being able to do that is pretty good. But I still hate every mile of it. It's boring. But you know what? It's worth it. I'm losing weight. Very slowly but it's happening. It is alone time for me, quiet time, without kids or housework or fighting or noise. And at the end of it, I get a Disney vacation. Without kids. A whole 5 days to myself. If you added up all of the time I've had to myself in the past 3 years, I don't think you'd get 5 days worth. So if a stress free, girls only vacation involves running 13.1 miles and training 3-5 times a week in the months leading up to it, well I'd say that's a pretty fair trade.