I threw up at the end of the one mile run for the Presidential Physical Fitness Challenge when I was in the fifth grade---and I didn’t even pass the test. From there, I failed to make either of the two teams I tried out for in high school----the basketball team and the softball team. To high school me, fitness consisted of 15 minutes on a stationary bike or the Cindy Crawford exercise workout and that was about it.
When I headed off to college, I bumped it up a little and used the Stairmaster in the fitness center on a regular basis, but I wasn’t working up a big sweat. Something happened during my sophomore year and I started to run. One day I heard that my dad had run a three mile loop around our house. After a few weeks, I heard that he was doing this pretty consistently and I decided that there was no way that my father was going to be able to run more than I could; so I started to run.
By my senior year of college I was running 3 miles fairly regularly when a professor told me to come for a run one Sunday morning. The next thing I knew I was doing a 3 mile speed workout with a one mile warm-up and a one mile cool down. I had never run this far, nor timed a run, but when he said that in four weeks we would be going to a half marathon, I couldn’t say no.
Since then, I have run 21 marathons, countless road races, endless training runs, and even coached cross country and track teams.
Since then, I have had a baby and I ran and swam each day until he was born. In fact, his middle name is Miles because we ran the Boston Marathon together when I was 13 weeks pregnant.
When I discovered that I was pregnant, I was less than two months away from running the Boston Marathon, and was slated to run a ten miler the next morning. I immediately began to look up advice about running during pregnancy and couldn’t find much. I decided I would see a doctor in a few weeks and would just keep on running! I ran the 10 mile race in the snow and ran another 10 miles the next day with one of the Windsor Running coaches.
What did I learn that might help others?
When I headed off to college, I bumped it up a little and used the Stairmaster in the fitness center on a regular basis, but I wasn’t working up a big sweat. Something happened during my sophomore year and I started to run. One day I heard that my dad had run a three mile loop around our house. After a few weeks, I heard that he was doing this pretty consistently and I decided that there was no way that my father was going to be able to run more than I could; so I started to run.
By my senior year of college I was running 3 miles fairly regularly when a professor told me to come for a run one Sunday morning. The next thing I knew I was doing a 3 mile speed workout with a one mile warm-up and a one mile cool down. I had never run this far, nor timed a run, but when he said that in four weeks we would be going to a half marathon, I couldn’t say no.
Since then, I have run 21 marathons, countless road races, endless training runs, and even coached cross country and track teams.
Since then, I have had a baby and I ran and swam each day until he was born. In fact, his middle name is Miles because we ran the Boston Marathon together when I was 13 weeks pregnant.
When I discovered that I was pregnant, I was less than two months away from running the Boston Marathon, and was slated to run a ten miler the next morning. I immediately began to look up advice about running during pregnancy and couldn’t find much. I decided I would see a doctor in a few weeks and would just keep on running! I ran the 10 mile race in the snow and ran another 10 miles the next day with one of the Windsor Running coaches.
What did I learn that might help others?