As they say, no news is good news!
When I ran the Great Ocean Road Marathon in May and sat down to write the race recap, it was so draining! It took me over a week and every time I sat down to begin again I felt exhausted – almost as if I was running the race over and over again. When I found out that I’d been selected as a SKINS Recruit for the Blackmores Sydney Marathon I decided to keep on top of my writing so I could keep a more accurate record. So each week I’ve glanced back at my training and given you the high lights or low lights, but this week I initially felt like there wasn’t much to tell! However, I only needed to look in the camera roll on my phone and at my Garmin watch to find my story.
The big story this week involved my furthest training run ever – 32km! On Sunday morning I hit the roads with some of the lovely ladies from Rachel’s Runners and set about knocking off another training milestone. We stocked up our gels and energy drinks; organised meeting times and locations and took off for another adventure! Our local area is set right on the Georges River. We are actually almost surrounded by waterways, yet in our busy lives we rarely take time to appreciate them. This is where running comes in handy, particularly long distance running, but appreciating Mother Nature is another story, one I did a couple of weeks ago. So…this week’s marathon story is about friendship.
When you are running for hours on end it can become mentally draining and so to pass the time on these long runs I love to run with other people. Most of these other people I have not know for very long at all – some 18 months, some 12 months, some less – yet every time I run with one of them we talk and talk about so much that we quickly become firm friends. No topic is out of bounds either! Just some of the things we talked about over the course of 32km this week included – anxiety, depression, waxing, toileting (yes Poo!), miscarriage, operations, chafing, horse and cart milk delivery, dealing with saboteurs and how we met our partners. Believe me, this is only the condensed version!
You can see from some of these topics why we have become so close so quickly. Some of these things are quite personal, yet we find that as we open up to each other we have more and more in common than we thought. In our crazy busy lives very rarely do we find time to really talk to other people about some of the stuff that needs to be talked about. Very rarely do we have time or occasion to listen to each other, really listen. Running changes this. Running is the reason we have come together in the first place, but it is also the time we need to talk, the time to discover that we are not alone, not the only one going through ‘stuff’. Whatever the question/problem/catastrophe, running usually has or is the solution and running with friends doubles your chances of finding your answers.
So in a week where no news seemed apparent, it really did turn out to be good news. A celebration of my furthest training run and a celebration of friendship!
Less than three weeks until the marathon! 🙂