Marathon Training, Week 3, Day 1, Morning Split: I Like Splits

I like splits. Like, gymnastic splits. Banana splits. Negative splits. Lickety split.

But in my past training life - before I started contemplating eating elephants - my all-or-nothing thinking kept me from splitting up single workouts. For some reason, I felt like it wasn't worth doing the workout if I wasn't doing it all at once. Which is kind of ridiculous if you think about it. I mean, I'm a triathlete, so a typical training day for me is split by pure neccessity: one sport in the morning, one sport at night. This has been my life for almost 3 years.

But for some reason it didn't click until I started training again a few weeks ago.

It became evident to me this morning that Kona was not in the mood to run. He had to stop and sniffle-snuffle every single blade of grass or patch of concrete we crossed. He made friends with a couple people and scared another (par for the course when you see this running toward you I guess.) It took us about 30 minutes to go just around 2 miles.

Normally, I would have turned around. I would have said, F- this noise. I give up. I'll just do my strength tonight and call it a wash. But this morning I said, "Well, it's not my fault he has ADD. He is, after all, a dog. I have to do my strength tonight anyway. So, as a warmup for my strength workout, I'll go do at least 1 mile, maybe a little more. 3 miles is 3 miles, no matter how I get there. "

And that pretty much summarizes my training philosophy for this marathon. I don't know what money's going to look like when it comes time to plan my triathlons next year, so I'm worrying about running, right now, training for the races that are important to me. I'm not going to do what I did last year with Philly and let being sick a few days get me down. I've got two, 19-20 mile runs in my schedule this year, so I'm going to make at least most of one of them, if not all of both. And I know what not to do, thanks to my Philly experience.

But I also know what TO do, and that is, focus on one bite at a time, and have fun.

26.2 miles is 26.2 miles, no matter how I get there. I'd rather get there with a smile on my face.