Everyone should have goals.

I started this blog several years ago in an attempt to chronicle my efforts at running the Marine Corps Marathon. What I found out was that training for a marathon is hard, maybe even harder than the race itself, though I wouldn't know since I have yet to complete the 26.2 miles. Depending on one's pace, at the height of the training program, one could spend seven or more hours a week pounding the pavement. If you have a full-time job and a couple of side jobs, running for the equivalent of a workday can be a little hard to accommodate.

Training time for the half marathon is much shorter, the longest runs are around 10 miles, which is eight-plus miles less than most marathon plans' longer runs. At nine minutes a mile, that's only 90 minutes of running, plus cooldown. Doable.

From what I've read, just the physical toll that the marathon takes on a body is another reason to pick a shorter distance. If the marathoner is walking a little slower and missing a couple of toenails, the half-marathoner, by comparison, is kicking up his heels, ready to go out dancing.

So, I am changing my goal to the half. I was signed up for the Marine Corps Historic Half Marathon, but it's a spring race and I hadn't been training during the winter, which is an absolute necessity. I'll focus on building up my distance and strength over the summer, and maybe pick a 13.1 miler in the fall, and combine that with a couple days away with my wife.

Of course, I'm not doing this just to run a half marathon. The overarching goal is weight loss

In a nod that being over-40 means I'm not as flexible as I was in my 20s or 30s, I am also exploring other ways to get in shape. Never a gym rat, I'm not a fan of the lift-things-up-and-put-them-down way of exercising. It works for other people, just not me. What has piqued my curiosity is the disciplines that focus on strength and flexibility, and yoga seems to offer both. I have picked up a copy of Sage Rountree's The Runner's Guide to Yoga. A friend of mine, also a firefighter and an avid runner, says it helped him with flexibility and balance while running.

In the days ahead, I'll try and post every run, on the same day if possible. I welcome any comments and helpful hints, particularly on what apps and training gear people use. I'm always on the lookout for better ways to do things.

Let's try this again, shall we?

For the first time in a very long time (six months? A year?) I got out the door to run this morning. 

Actually, "run" is a rather grandiose term for what I did, but the point is I put one foot in front of the other and had both feet off the ground at the same time for a large part of a-mile-and-change. 

The other day, I posted in my personal journal how I had had enough of a number of negative things, and I decided that my outlook would be more positive. My thinking is that if I am positive in the way I view things, then things will be more positive. This isn't a new concept, though I'll admit it is new to me. 

One of my more critical ways I look at myself is my physical appearance. I'm overweight - though not nearly as heavy as I was when I got on the fire department - and my cardiovascular endurance is terrible. The fact that I'm 46 and all that implies in terms of metabolism is not helpful. Something had to be done. 

I've never been the kind of person to keep at something when I've experienced significant setbacks (a personal failing), and trying to bang out two miles or more, only to hit the proverbial wall at half a mile, does not lend itself to repeat performances. I need to enter this stuff gradually. 

One of the apps on my phone is Runkeeper, and it comes with various training plans, so I selected the Jeff Galloway run/walk method. Only had to do ten minutes or so this morning, and I did it so that I completed a mile. I did a local route that started and ended at my driveway. The only hiccup was trying to get the music to function properly, which didn't occur until I was done with the running portions. Also, I'll need to look into a different carrier for my phone. the one I have is for the bulkier iPhone 6, and I have the iPhone 7.

The weather largely cooperated and didn't drizzle until I got home and was stretching on my front steps, though the humidity was a little much. Took me about 14 minutes, and I felt pretty good afterward.

I've set a goal of losing 25 pounds by the end of July, which is doable, as long as I get my diet under control, not an easy feat. 

But, one step at a time.

Back at it...Again

It seems a bit like Groundhog Day, but once again I'm trying to get back into a regular routine of running. Only this time, I've actually gotten out there, four times in the past week.

It hasn't been much, a mile and three-quarters in the longest one. And it hasn't been easy, which makes me a bit wistful of the way I was running last summer, a time when five-miles was a breeze. Of course, I realize that getting out there regularly will eventually get me back to that point, but in the interests of instant gratification...I want to be there now. (In a small indication that I'm progressing, I have lowered my average pace on the 1.25 mile course by 40 seconds or so, from 10'34" to 9'51". It didn't feel that way, though.)

At the moment, I'm concentrating on running just in the local neighborhood, either Old Freehold Road through the Walnut Street School yard, then Walnut Street back to OFR, or up to the High School and back. The weather has been largely cooperative, but we are getting towards the winter months, so I'd like to establish a regular routine before then, because I'm not going to be wanting to get out there when the temperatures are at freezing or below if I haven't.

I'm aiming for a near-term goal of five miles per run, which I should get to by December 1st if I keep this up. Last year, while training for the marathon I didn't run (yet...someday I will, when I can devote four hours on a Saturday to training), I found out about the Manasquan Reservoir, which has a beautiful 5-mile perimeter course around the water. Now, if one could only do it without the assorted other walkers, runners, and bicyclists, it would be perfect. In late spring, I'm going to try again for the Historic Half Marathon, and by try, I mean run the whole thing.

I'm still using Nike+, which seems to be pretty accurate. I've thought about trying one of the other apps, such as RunKeeper, but if it works, why change it. My Nike-sponsored cheerleaders for the first couple of runs have either been Shalane Flanagan or Sanya Richards-Ross.

For a little bit different take on things, check out my friend Roseanne Rappoccio's blog. She's a fellow never-was-a-runner, and has really gotten into it. She says she still doesn't like it, but I'm not quite sure I believe her.

Finally, I've changed up my playlist, too, trying to get a fresh start.

First five songs, old and new playlists:

·         “Armageddon It”, Def Leppard	·         “Out of Our Heads”, Dropkick Murphys
·         “Already Gone”, The Eagles	·         “Sing the Changes”, The Fireman
·         “I Want It All”, Queen	·         “Danger Zone”, Kenny Loggins
·         “She’s A Rebel”, Green Day	·         "If I Should Fall From Grace With God”, The Pogues
·         “Back In The Saddle”, Aerosmith	·         “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, Billy Joel

Baby Steps.

It's been several months, but I finally got out there. Just 1.3-and-change miles (a far cry from the five or six miles I did with ease just a year ago) and it was tough. And in a summer of moderate temperatures and low humidity, I pick the muggiest morning in weeks to go out.

Still, it was something. Now, the challenge is to turn this something into more somethings, at least a couple times per week.

I have a couple of motivations for doing this.

The first, and foremost, is to be healthy. When I was running last summer, I was in the best shape in years, and likely my life. My resting heart rate was in the mid-60s (unheard of for me before then), and my weight got as low as 189 pounds, where I hadn't been since high school. Predictably, a lot of the clothing and uniforms I had either didn't fit well, or actually fit better, though more (much more) the former than the latter. I actually downsized my turnout gear in the firehouse.

Now, I'm back up to 207 pounds (still a lot lower than the 244 I was sworn in at nine-plus years ago), and items that fit much better are getting a little - in some cases more than a little - tight again. I've reached the comfort limit of my turnout gear, and there isn't really an option to upsize the gear again, especially since the fire department is about to put seven new members through the academy, and they'll be taking the spare gear.

I have a goal of running the entire Marine Corps Historic Half Marathon. I've done the race once, but only ran about half of it, with not a lot of training. I want to do the whole thing, and the goal for that is next May.

Another reason is to make studying easier. I'm doing a lot of reading and note-taking in preparation for the Captain's test, tentatively scheduled for mid-November. I'm hoping that by getting in shape now, I'll study better. After all, just about every study out there says your brain functions better when the rest of the body does.

And finally, I'm no spring chicken. Everything hurts a little bit each day, some more than others, and it will only get worse. I don't want to put myself in a position to be hurt at work because I pre-hurt myself by letting things go. Getting into shape, and maybe doing a bit of yoga here or there, might help to forestall that.

http://t.co/9EeTZYabOQ. Sanya Richards-Ross was my post-run motivator.

Then Again, Maybe Not.

This wasn't, exactly, the post I had hoped to write after the Marine Corps Marathon. I thought it would go something along the lines of my finishing time, the experience around the event itself, maybe include a couple of pictures I had taken along the route. Perhaps include a list of damaged body parts that every long distance runner at times has to contend with. (Let's just say that Vaseline and/or bandaids are a handy tool to have.)

Instead, my line of thinking lately has been taking one of two paths: either "Making progress! Last year I signed up, this year I signed up and trained, next year I'm gonna sign up, train, AND run it!" or "maybe the half-marathon is more my speed." It can vary from hour-to-hour.

Among other things, it came down to $10. I'm not kidding. After getting back from vacation in the Outer Banks at the end of September, I had one shift at one of the side jobs, and the take-home (after taxes and paying a pension loan) was a little over $10. Like everybody else, I've got certain bills that have to be paid, and a $200-400 weekend in Washington, DC, wasn't going to improve that balance sheet, and in fact, exacerbate it. And that's after figuring in that we weren't staying in a hotel, but rather with friends from my wife's high school days, and whom I worked with way back in the day. The hotel would have been another $350.

One of the ironies of training for a marathon is that you really need to have time to devote to proper training for the race, which doesn't leave you a lot of time to work to pay your bills. In the latter half of the schedule, when long runs were in the 14-18 mile range, that's 3 to 4 hours of running. Unless I really wanted to get up at 1 in the morning before work, or be out til 1 in the morning after work (and after sitting in a car for an hour or so each way, and 12 hour shifts in between), I made sure to take at least one day off each weekend for those runs. Unfortunately, the way EMS schedules work, folks like to be off on the weekends to spend with their families, so per-diems work a lot of weekend shifts.

Cutting out 50% of your potential opportunities to work is no way to make sure those bills are paid.

I'd be lying if I said that the training didn't start to suffer long before the marathon, though. Something was always getting in the way. Soccer, school events, work. In my increasingly undisciplined mind, it was getting easier and easier to justify cutting short a long run here, or skipping a short run there. The end result was that I had run just 15 miles in October, and none after the second week.

A couple other small issues popped up that had to be taken care of which, if they had happened without the other stuff, would not have been a problem, but in the end just made the decision to skip the MCM that much easier.

There have been upsides to the training, which a couple of people, including one of the Marathon Jims, had pointed out, and is that the training is never "for nothing". I'm down to a couple pounds over what has been my lowest weight in probably 25 years, and I now know that I can run at least three miles non-stop, at a pace of around 8 minutes and change per mile, without killing myself (well, maybe not in the last month, but I did, and can get back there again). I've learned to run without music in my ears, since over those longer runs the battery on my (former) iPhone 4 didn't hold up to simultaneous use of the GPS and iPod functions for more than two or three hours. (Though I do wonder how much better those longer long runs would have been, since running for that long is dreadfully boring.) And without music, you are left to your own thoughts, which admittedly I can't say that I have much opportunity otherwise to just think.

And perhaps the most heartening of all is that my nine-year-old asked my wife the other day how old you had to be to run in a marathon. Maybe the apple doesn't fall far from the tree after all, and I have a future running partner in the family.

So, what to do now? Well, the other day, a colleague of mine from UH-EMS had told me that several members of NorthSTAR were planning a group entry in to the New Jersey Half Marathon in Long Branch, NJ in April 2014, and would I like to join them. Having actually completed the Historic Half this year, and the training for a half marathon is much simpler than for the full, I'm inclined to say yes.

As to a full marathon, like I mentioned before, I'm of two minds. Lately, it's been all half-marathon, all the time...but then I was watching coverage of the NYC Marathon this morning and started to think, "well...." If I do register for the marathon, it'd likely be for the fall (since I have to work - a lot - over the next few months to pay some bills, and we know where that leads), and I'd like another shot at the MCM. Given the popularity of the MCM, I'd have to run in the Spring race, the 17.75K, in mid-April to get an automatic qualifier. On the other hand, that's a lot of running in a month and a half, between the 17.75K, the Long Branch Half, and the Historic Half, which I'm likely going to do again.

Decisions, decisions....

Finally, thanks to all who have offered words of support, encouragement, or just plan "just do it." They were all appreciated, and in each way helped me a little farther along. I'm going to keep contributing to this blog, posting updates on what I'm doing, and how I'm doing it, if for no other reason than to get the jumble of thoughts in my head out in the open, so everybody can see just how disorganized my brain is at times.