Day 60 - Todd 1, Sun Run 0 : )

The thing I've decided on in my attempts to get my health on a consistent path of goodness the last two months is that if I look at the end result I'm just going to get over-whelmed or lose interest.  I've already noticed a few little bad habits already creeping in over the past couple of weeks.  Not sanitizing my nebulizer mouth piece with the regularity I should.  Perhaps not forcing myself to have that last little snack before my big pre-sleep gorging.  I'm still doing a ton of good things, things I wasn't doing before.  And these are by no means massive lapses in my care, I'm just illustrating how easy it is for these little concessions to creep back into our daily habits.  But by setting little goals that are a month away, a month and a half away, it helps because that gives me a definitive target to work towards that's on the horizon, but not too far in the distance that I just decide to forget about it.  The most recent target date came yesterday.  Yesterday was the Vancouver Sun Run, an annual event where 60 to 70 thousand runners decide to torture themselves for an hour or two early on a chilly April morning.  Admittedly, as I stood there with my Father and Brother-in-law shivering away for the half hour before the race, I wondered for a moment why the heck I was bothering with this when I could be at home comfortably snuggled under my covers.  Once the race started though, I just set to it to give it my best effort.  I made no delusions of being able to run the whole thing.  In my training leading up to it, I'd never really managed run for more than a half mile at one time.  No, I was planning on walking, but walking at a good pace.  And I made a promise to myself that at the end of the race, I wasn't going to have left anything on the table.  In my opinion, I kept my promise.  I managed to run the first kilometer before slowing to walking, and pushed myself to run as often as possible throughout and finish by running the final kilometer to the finish line.  As for my result, I'd hoped to at least do better the 1h30min.

As you can see, I more than met my goal.  I generally try to stay even keel on things, not get to high or too low.  If it's bad news, I find the good, if its good news I temper it with how it could be better.  I'm not going to lie though, I'm really happy with this result.  I couldn't have seen myself performing any better, especially considering I did this while awaiting Hernia Surgery!  Now I'm just going to have to try and improve on that next year.  I'd also like to thank my Dad and Brother-in-law for being there with me, even though once the run started I told them to bugger off and not worry about staying with me, it was really nice knowing they were there.  And I'm pretty proud at the time my dad put in who was in the top 100 for his age bracket.

Well tomorrow is my much ballyhooed hernia surgery so I can finally get that bad boy repaired.  This means I'll have to take a step back from the exercise for the next couple weeks, but I've already set my next mini target date.  May 27th is the great strides walk, now it's only a walk and not a run and its only 5km, but it'll be 5km of me pushing a twin stroller so I'll need to have myself in pretty good shape : ).  I'll also be fundraising for it so if there is anyone out there who wants to chip in to the cause I'll have info on that later.