10. Completing the Sunburst Marathon without dying of heatstroke. Very cool bling, excellent finish area venue (Notre Dame Stadium), great little weekend jaunt.
9. Completing the Quebec City Marathon without getting heatstroke. You'd think I'd learn: August is not the coolest month to run a marathon. Oh well. Excellent trip, fun with the kids, amazing restaurants, great beer.
8. Completing the Las Vegas Marathon... no, no heatstroke possibilities this time. Perfect weather, excellent tunes, topnotch organization, and a city that needs to be seen to be believed.
7. Gradually increasing the consistency of my daily run pace and speed. I'm constantly challenging myself to work my speed up just a little all the time. This means brushing off the bad days where the energy or the push just isn't there. Kinda like life in general I guess.
6. Keeping my weight at a consistent 160 pounds. This is a record low weight for me in my adult life, and it's a very healthy weight. I very rarely get sick or injured (knocking furiously on wood as I type that), eat a varied but considered and consistent diet, include very little meat in my meals... it's working very well. And what amazes me most of all is just how significantly over-sized the portions that are served in restaurants or on average tables truly are.
5. Attention to working my core is paying dividends. Ok, so I won't be doing stomach modelling any time soon, but I truly feel the increased strength and stability in my core. I believe this has been very instrumental in the low number of injuries I've incurred in the past year as well, and the faster recovery time after races or long runs. Pay attention to your core, people, it's critical!
4. Making relatively regular entries in this blog. Essentially talking to myself is what it is, I know, but it helps to articulate goals, milestones, strengths, weaknesses, triumphs... anyone reading this who doesn't keep a blog, should. A very positive exercise.
3. Taking more pictures. My sage advice again: you can never take too many pictures. They cost nothing anymore, SD cards with space to store all of human knowledge cost about $10, and a 1.5 terabyte external hard drive ( a terabyte is bigger than two universes, approximately) costs less than $100. And when you page back through those thousands of pictures you'll relive those glorious moments that passed like a heartbeat, and your overwhelming thought will be: I should have taken more.
2. Completing the Goodlife Toronto Marathon with a friend who had a very bad year and didn't really want to run this marathon alone. We had a great 4 hour and 38 minute chat, and it was a really good day and a really good experience. Cameraderie: establish it, build on it. There's nothing like it.
1. Running the Around the Bay Road Race in Hamilton, for two reasons. I finished it in 3:05 (30 kilometres) which is like lightning for me. More importantly, I found out afterward that a friend had also run it and was consistently two minutes ahead of me, start to finish. I found this out at his funeral a couple months later (he died in Nepal, a freak infection issue, still a young man not even 40).Which was a whole lot of metaphors for life in general... pick them out as you wish.
1 comment:
160 lbs...we are brothers! :-) I try to maintain that weight too, but given I'm a foot short it should be closer to 155...maybe once I can run consistently.
Great list!
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