Marine Corps Marathon, Training Tips

Your Business Blogger and me

running the Richmond Marathon We are training for our third marathon. And this year The Dreamer will be able to join us.

She has done a triathlon, so she knows training and preparation and, well, pain, I think. A child’s pain, is always more painful to parent than child.

Which makes this marathon doubly painful. I got mine. I got hers.

Jack is a pain…sometimes. And sometimes not.

So we have the hurts and the runners’ high at the same time. Highs and Lows. Contradictions.

Except I’m not sure just how much pain she’s in. The Dreamer has not been running for a decade yet. (One track coach said she had natural talent. The only thing her parents could do was mess her up…) At the track, she laps her parents with ease.

So we don’t really know her pain level, but we do know ours. And knowing the pain will be a-coming, the hardest part is getting started. We are using the Jeff Galloway training program and he has advice for GETTING STARTED,

Those who run for 20 years or more tend to have the following things in common:

They enjoy most of the miles of almost every run.

They take extra days off from running to recover from aches, pains and burnout.

They don’t let goals (and training schedules) interfere with running enjoyment.

Or any of life’s enjoyments. With all of its contradictions:

Life is solidary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

And,

Life is Good.

On our New Balance we’ve had more of the latter than the former.

Thank you (foot)notes:

This is an unpaid advertisement/endorsement – From Running Getting Started by Jeff Galloway.

Nasty, Brutish and Short is not a law firm. But there is a very good blog Nasty, Brutish & Short, Penned by legal counsel, of course. Jack and I share a passion for ellipitcals with the lawyer at NBS. Both the trainers and reasoning, I guess.

The life of mankind when in his natural state…Thomas Hobbes’

Leviathan, or the matter, forme, and power of a commonwealth, ecclesiasticall and civill, 1651. The fuller quotation of this phrase is even less appealing – “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Hobbes described the natural state of mankind (the state pertaining before a central government is formed) as a “warre of every man against every man”. In the book he outlines the ‘incommodites’ of such a war:

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”