Training Week 0

On October 19th I'll be running the Nike Women's Half Marathon in San Francisco on behalf on Team In Training (TNT). TNT is a program through The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society where in exchange for fund raising they provide coaching for different endurance events. The unofficial motto of TNT is from the couch to the finish line.

The last couple weeks I've been working out and basically training for the training. I was hesitant to do too much running. Yesterday we had our first short group run followed by a series of clinics.

I ran about 1/4 mile yesterday, before transitioning to a walk. Mostly due to shin pain. I need to go purchase better running shoes this week, and always warm up. For me I think the warm up needs to be about 5-10 minutes of a normal walk, without doing this I always end up with shin pain.

A group of 5 of us signed on to TNT together. It seemed as if it dawned on us yesterday that this was going to be hard. But we also have plenty of time to train. On Tuesday we'll have our first track workout, where our coaches will go over proper running form.

We also had a series of clinics yesterday: about proper running shoes, injury prevention and nutrition. Turns out (I did suspect this) that I supinate, meaning I walk on the edges of my feet. This mostly happens when you have high arches, and years of ballet as a child left me with pretty high arches.

Injury prevention was great- I'm really looking forward to learning proper running form. I don't think I'm using my core as much as needed in my running efforts. I'm going to concentrate on my core for cross training days, as well as adding back in some basic yoga everyday to strengthen my core.

Nutrition was the eye opener. In retrospect it seems like a huge 'duh' moment but...we're going to have to basically carb-load the next 5 months to sustain our training. After years of being told not to eat carbs it felt frightening to hear someone talking about making sure you eat lots of carbs. He said words like pasta and rice. My friend reassured me by whispering in my ear "it's okay, if you eat pasta eat whole grain pasta, and brown rice." Which I already do.

And I learned my lesson yesterday about eating before working out. I skipped breakfast, mainly because I got up at the last possible moment. Even with just a short workout I was feeling a lack of energy from not eating. Much better to learn that early in the season, when I only had to make it back another mile than later in the season.