and miles to go before I rest...

So, having run, err, walked, the Baltimore half-marathon back in October, I found myself on the mailing list and facebook page of the company that organizes the marathon, and several other running events. One of which is the Baltimore Ten Miler, in June, which runs through madanthony's old neighborhood (and the backdrop for several scenes in The Wire) of Reservoir Hill. After waffling back and forth for a while, I decided to sign up today.

Which means now I actually need to start training. I work out pretty much every day - typically 90 minutes on the elliptical and about 30 minutes of low-impact strength training. As you can imagine from the fact that I still hover on the line between normal and overweight on the BMI scale, this isn't enough exercise, and is counteracted by too many visits to the cookie and ice cream sections of the grocery store and the all-you-can-eat buffet at work.

I did the half-marathon with no extra training whatsoever - and my finish reflected it, around 7500th out of the 8000 finishers with a time that was about 3x that of the 1st place finisher - in other words, he could have done 40 miles in the time it took me to do 13.

Which means in the next week or 2 I need to start a new training regiment. Ideally, what I hope to start doing is doing some running before work - either on the treadmill at the gym (to better simulate the experience of road running, plus to try to get myself on the pace that I need to be on to improve my time) or around the Reservoir near work. The question is if I can make myself do it - I'm not a big fan of getting up early (or going to bed early, a necessary condition to getting up early). I have to remind myself how bad I felt when I realized how much I sucked after the half-marathon - hopefully I can shame myself into putting in the work that I need to put in to get a decent finish time.