So, what happens after the Marathon?
For the past ten months now, I’ve had the Chicago Marathon countdown clock bookmarked in my browser on my home computer.
Every so often, I’ll click on the link to see the days, minutes, hours and seconds dwindling down until I check off the most physically challenging item on my bucket list.
From the moment I started running on January 1, the countdown clock has served as both a motivator and something that quite literally scares me into getting out the door on the mornings where I haven’t felt like running.
“Okay, you only have X days to go until the Marathon and if you miss this run…”
Over the course of the past ten months, my life has centered around accomplishing this singular goal. I’ve put a not-insignificant part of my career that I’ve spent most of my adult life working towards on hold specifically to focus more of my time and energy on training and raising money for the charity that I’m running for.
Marathon training has brought with it structure in the form of detailed running programs initially from my Couch to 5k app when I started running and later from the Chicago Area Runners Association (CARA) that are essentially idiot proof (Seriously, if you’re going to run a marathon, I cannot recommend CARA’s group program highly enough. It’s amazing.).
Here’s how many miles you have to run on this day, here are the days you need to give your body a break on, lather, rinse, repeat.
The whole experience has been, to date, pretty fantastic.
To recap:
- My waist has shrunk by four inches, and I can now fit into a size 34 jean for the first time since high school.
- I’m down 14 pounds so far from my highest weight, and still shedding pounds.
- I ran a 5k and a half marathon on consecutive days in July.
- I’m actually following a regular exercise program for the first time since high school and I’ve come to learn that I don’t actually hate it.
But, as with any bucket list item, there is going to come a date at which point the goal is going to be completed. That’s something I’m reminded of more and more every time I click on the link to the Chicago Marathon countdown clock, and it’s something I’ve been asking myself more and more during my morning and evening commutes.
What’s next? What happens after I cross the finish line of the Chicago Marathon on October 8th?
That is perhaps the one part of this experience that I wasn’t mentally prepared for. I knew it was going to be a grind both mentally and physically, and I knew that it was going to eat up a lot of my summer.
I wasn’t prepared to dread having copious amounts of free time once the race itself ended.
Barring a truly horrible race, I am already planning on running Chicago again this time next year if only to have some sort of workout structure to follow, although next time around I’ll be following the advice of that marathon diet book that I bought but didn’t really read much a lot closer.
I like the changes that marathon training has made in my life. I’m a lot healthier and generally a lot happier than I’ve been at any point in my adult life, if only because four days a week I have about 1–3 hours on each of those days built in where I don’t have to think about anything at all.
While marathon training has eaten up a lot of my time and required a lot of social and career sacrifices, I am going to miss the structure of it a great deal, of knowing exactly what I have to do and when I have to do it.
That being said, I have no idea how I’m going to fill my mornings when I don’t have a set distance to run each day.
To learn more about Open Heart Magic, which has more than 120 volunteers that go around to Chicago hospitals and teach kids how to do magic tricks and is the charity that I’m running the Chicago Marathon for, please click here and consider donating.
