Running for Your Life: Over the Hump

When it comes to marathons, you never know, but with fewer than six weeks to go before the big day (Sunday, July 27, Barrington County, Nova Scotia), so far, so good.

What I’ve come to know about running in marathons (completing five) since I began this relatively crazy pursuit is that it predictions are of little merit.

Suffice to say that for this race I’m pretty much on schedule. Long runs? I did run for going onto three hours three weeks ago in Barcelona, a city of beaches where I loped along the Mediterranean to a development known for its giant solar panel, along a boardwalk with a slew of nightspots and pier prix-fixe seafood restaurants out toward a patio-stone esplanade (pretty much empty of runners except for the occasional clutch of American ex-patriots who I swear exult “USA! USA! USA!” as they fist-pump along in red, white and blue bandanas) and on to the spinnaker-shaped W Hotel, then back to Olympic Park Village, named for the wondrously strange failed Catalan utopia of Icaria, to Ciutadella Park where the minstrels and jugglers and gymnastic partners and piƱata-punishing children delights as the tourist with a touch of class wend their way for hours in the waning sun.

Those seventeen miles went by relatively easily; it’s flat in that part of Barcelona, like the Nova Scotian coastline I’m be running along in six weeks, similar again to my next long run and walk, a minimum of eighteen, out along the Hudson River Park in Manhattan planned for Thursday (June 19); I’m training differently this time, with intermittent one-minute walk breaks because at fifty-eight it seems advisable, especially given the title of this blog – Running for Your Life – and I’d like to not repeat my experience in Steamtown last October, which wasn’t a fun time. At the sixteen-mile mark I started to break down and the next ten miles, well … Not pretty. Am hoping this easier training regimen will make it better for me. But as I said, you never know. You just gotta get out there, get the miles in ….


Next: Running for Your Life: Treadmill Time