I chose to start training for a half marathon on the coldest week of the year, if not the coldest week ever.  I’ve run a few other long races and trained through the winter, but the beginning of this training has been different, well not only different but challenging.

First off I don’t have my running crew.  The ladies I normally run with are not training for this race.   Our lives have pulled us, I hope temporarily, in different directions.  As I do not miss getting up at 5 am in the freezing cold dark, I very much miss the calming company they bring and the sharing of our lives in the conversation that falls to the rhythm of our feet.

However, I do have a new running partner.  The one guilty of signing me up for this race in the first place, the one who has cheered me on the most, and the one who has picked up the slack when I have given all my energy and patience and the ability to speak calmly (or the ability to speak at all) on the long miles I had just run. My husband. This new partnership is both enjoyable and troublesome.  Enjoyable in that I am not alone in this training, and it is something we can do and experience together as a couple.  One of my favorite things to do is be active with my family, and now I get to schedule it in on a weekly basis.  Troublesome because we have four children that we cannot easily take with us while we run, and therefore we cannot run at the same time.  I am also losing my backup when a run wipes me out.  Chances are good that he also will be wiped out with the probability going way up for grouchiness and maybe too many Netflix viewings for the kiddos.

With these new changes and challenges in place, I decided to do a blog series on my/our training.  This will give me a different form of accountability and a way to journal this race’s training.  If you are curious about what it is like to train for a half marathon with a family of young-ins and a husband that decided he would like to try out a half as well, specifically the same half you are running, then please feel free to follow along.  Since that is probably a very small number of people anywhere and you do not fit into this group but would also like to follow along as we stumble through the next 13 weeks please feel free to do so. Even if you have no desire to run any length of race, or pavement, or earth of any kind feel free to follow along to solidify why you do not run.  But you may find that running and training for a race are so much more than simply running, and if that was all it is I would have quit after the first day.

Other posts in this series:

Week 1 – Trying to Control the Uncontrollable