The first running post on the blog, appropriately, is about my first race.
Now I’m not a COMPLETE novice when it comes to running. I’ve actually been running regularly for at least three or four years now. What changed this year is I decided to start putting more work into it, with the hopes of competing in the Istanbul marathon this November.
On a note that is somewhat unrelated to that goal, sometime in January a very running-y friend of mine that is way more intense than me invited me to try out a race in Iznik with him and another friend of ours. It is a super-cool ultra-marathon event that happens just a few hours away from where I live.
Now if you haven’t heard about ultra-running let me give you a quick scoop. I hadn’t heard about this either until right before my friend invited me.
Basically, a marathon is SUPER far to run, super daunting, and basically the pinnacle of all physical achievement. So I went on Amazon looking for Kindle books to help inspire me in my journey to this impossible-ness. What I found was this cool e-book called “Running and Stuff” by James Adams
Except “Running and Stuff” opens describing a run that goes all the way across the United States. Where day after the day the participants run multiple marathons in a row.
This is ultra-running. Officially, any run that is longer than a marathon. Some of them get a lot longer.
So when my friend sent me the e-mail about Iznik, I was like:
Wow, this ultra-running thing seems super intense, and you’d kind of have to have a screw loose to do the crazy stuff these people are doing.
Sounds like my kind of sport.
Now I’m not a complete idiot, so I realized running 46K, 80K or 130K (Iznik’s longer options) in April when my original goal was a marathon the following November was not a great idea. However our third friend was very encouraging and said she would run the 10k with me, because she had done one before, plus it would be good for me to have some kind of race experience before the big race in the fall.
So I let a few weeks (or months) go by. And then one day in a panic I was like “Oh, no, I already missed several price cut-offs and the race will fill up and I’ll be the only one who doesn’t get to run and I’ll just have to watch from the sidelines” and filled out my racing registration.
Then a couple weeks later I found out that neither of my friends had registered, and because both were so busy with work they didn’t think they would make it out to the race after all.
So you might be wondering: what happened? Did I go? Did I run? Did I outperform everyone and end up in the Guinness book of World Records for 10ks?
You’ll have to keep reading to find out.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t write this whole blog post just to tell you about a race I registered for but never ran. The rest… you’ll have to wait for.
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