Colorado Half Marathon Recap

I won’t beat around the bush – I DNS’ed (Did Not Start).

Friday I came down with a nasty, nasty cold. We drove up to Ft. Collins anyway on Saturday, me still determined to run the race. I felt increasingly worse on Saturday, and on the drive up, kept thinking that if one more thing happened, I would take it as a sign that I wasn’t meant to run this race. Well, that “thing” ended up being not sleeping AT ALL the night before the race, due to someone who obviously was participating in the same race on the floor above us in the hotel literally stomping around in their room until midnight, and then up again at 4 a.m. to get ready. When my husband woke up at 5:45 and realized I’d never gotten up, I told him I was too sick and too tired to race.

Truthfully, I felt like if I was just tired, or just sick, or just pregnant, I would have still ran. If I didn’t have to care or worry about keeping the kiddo healthy, I would have surely said to hell with it and still ran. I don’t care, I will put my body through a lot of crap when it comes to running because it’s just that important to me to finish what I’ve trained for. But when you’re housing another human being, suddenly you are worried about what putting your own body through hell does to that other person. I was too worried, and felt that if I ran on zero sleep, plus an obviously beaten down immune system, that I would very quickly reach the point of total body exhaustion. And I didn’t want to get there.

But you can believe I threw myself a big pity party about it and cried some big crocodile tears. I know I can’t control getting sick – it’s just bad luck. I know I can’t control noisy people above me – it’s just the luck of the draw. But it still totally bums me out and gosh darn it, I feel defeated! There are few things more frustrating to me know that I am capable of doing something, but for one reason or another, can’t.

Some races just aren’t meant to be. I swear, I will sign up for this race again next year, for the third year in a row, and I WILL run that half marathon! It will give me good motivation to get my body back post-baby.

Regardless of today’s outcome, I read some very wise words from Beth @ Shut Up and Run!

Two possible attitudes moving forward:

I failed. Why bother? Screw it. I put in all that training and for what? It’s just not worth it. I’m not meant to run marathons. I won’t try that again.

OR

This was a challenge. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. My body didn’t like 17 miles of downhill and it seized up on me. But, this is only the beginning. There is always another race.  This disappointment will not be my only memory of what a marathon is. It will not define me as a runner. I’ll create a new memory on a different race day. It is mine for the taking and the only people who fail are those who fail to try.

If you read my previous blog for awhile, you know that when I fail to complete something, it just motivates me to try harder. While I do have another half marathon in two weeks, I’m strongly considering switching to the marathon relay with a neighbor and my husband making up the relay team. We have to work out the details, but I am really excited about this possibility – I’ll probably run two legs of the relay and total about 9 miles altogether. I’ve always wanted to do a marathon relay, and I can go into it with zero expectations. Since I ran the Colfax Marathon last year as my first half marathon, I am afraid I’ll give myself high expectations to beat my time last year. So we’ll see moving forward, but I will always, always keep moving forward.