Heavy Pills

We’ve all encountered first time marathoners who ask 1,829 questions that they are perfectly serious about asking, yet seem completely unrelated to training.  I’ve had a few asked of me, actually.

Dear Coach,

I missed my 3 mile run today!  It’s my first week of marathon training, do I need to make up those miles?

Or

I couldn’t sleep last night and my marathon is only 6 weeks away!  Will I be OK on race day?

Or

My shoes got wet and were squelching for most of my run today, am I going to be able to race in October?

Or

I was only able to run 5 of my 10 miles today before I had to quit, go home and take a nap.  Will I be able to finish 26.2 miles on race day?  .... almost laughable, except that I actually thought this on Monday, and wondered if it’s time to send a painfully stupid question out to my running coach....

 






I work 12-13 hours on my feet each shift.  I run the other 4 days a week.  Sometimes I run on work days, and sometimes I don’t.  Either way it’s exhausting.  My legs are tired.  When I run, they feel like they are full of lead lined muscles.

What I do as a nurse isn’t new to nurses anywhere.  We walk-run around our units for 12 hours with our hair on fire throwing pain pills at people, turning patients, and silencing IV alarms (ok, ok, that’s not what we do, but there are plenty of people who think that’s what we do).  In a study published by OJIN, researchers found that the cumulative weight lifted by a nurse in an 8 hour shift was equivalent to 1.8 tons (what can I say?  The pain pills are heavy).  A nurse on my unit tracked her pedometer for a week and it peaked at 6 miles of walking one day.  For the record, she walked no less than 4.5 miles in a shift. 

And I'm not complaining.  I love my job.  I love doing what I do.  I think I am doing a pretty darned good job for someone who's so new to the profession.

So, I am trying to figure out how all the exhaustion and work lines up in my training plan... except that I don’t think it does....  For the last two weeks I’ve been “resting” on my work days.  So essentially, I’m walking 4-6 miles and lifting 1.8 tons on my “rest” days.  And then for SOME reason I am surprised that my running is so sucky.

AnyHOOOOOOOO.  This is PEAK WEEK 1 of 2 for me.  I’m supposed to run about 36 miles over the next 4 days, with a dedicated day of rest and no work thrown in there for good measure.

And I AM TIRED.

I DON’T WANT TO DO ANYTHING EXCEPT LAY DOWN AND SLEEP TODAY.

AND I’m not going to do that.  Because even if I want to sleep today, I will wake up after my nap and want to run a marathon in October.  

If I was to tell a first time marathoner ONE thing, it would be this:

Marathons aren’t about getting up on race day and running 26.2 miles.

They are about getting up on all the training days and running consistent miles.

~savor the run~