Packing for Adventure

I do some sort of walking or running almost every single day. Physical fitness is very important to me, though I’m no body builder haha!

I just really love traveling and the outdoors, and I in particular love hiking. I hike as often as I can given my busy home and work schedule. Since snow kinda kills my hiking buzz in the winter, I have to stay in shape for hiking by running in the winter.

Though again, I love the outdoors. I really hate running on a treadmill, so running in the winter is more of a chore than I’d like. In order to stay motivated, I have to sign myself up for races.

To prep for my trip to the Grand Canyon, I did a winter running series last year. This involved running 4 races in the winter, all of them between February and April. It started with a 5K, then a 10K, then a 10-mile hike, and then a half marathon. Many people used this race series as a way to train for a marathon in May, though I just did another half marathon in May.

I am NOT GOOD at running. I’ve been doing these races for years, and I never seem to get any better!

So this winter race series is pretty small – it’s mostly super athletic people who are crazy enough to pay to run in the snow in the bleak winter. And me.

What I love about participating in big marathon races is that if I do a half marathon, I finish ahead of hundreds of people! Never mind that they are running 26 miles instead of my 13…

So participating in this winter race series was a huge blow to my ego since each individual race was just a single event. I was in the bottom 3 for the 5K, 10K, and 10-mile races. As for the first half marathon, that was a new low. When I made it to mile 10.5 ish, a woman caught up to me holding a flag and she asked me if I was a race participant. Come to find out, she was the race sweeper. So basically it was her job to “sweep up” the dregs of the race participants. She said that she had been running with two race participants who dropped out at mile 7 ish and she’d been running as fast as she could to make it to the end of the race – until she caught up to me.

At this point, I was feeling pretty sluggish and my legs were hurtin. Once I found out she was the sweeper, I started walking! She was super nice and chatted with me the whole time. She kept saying stuff like “if we run at a 10-minute pace, we can finish by 11:00!” She was so nice, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that on my BEST DAY, when I haven’t already run 10 miles, my max speed is a 12-minute mile!

The best part? Chris and the kids were at the finish line waiting for my victorious end of the race. They didn’t come until about 15 minutes before I told them to expect me to finish, and by that point, most participants were long finished. So when we cross the finish line, my 5-year-old daughter ran up to me shouting about how proud she was of me for WINNING THE RACE! Hahahaha since they hadn’t seen anyone else cross the finish line!

Since the second half marathon I did was a much larger event, I ran the race at the same time as marathoners, so crossing the finish line was much less embarassing.

All that being said, I run to stay in shape for hiking. I figure if I can run 3 miles, I can probably hike 10!