Running Recap: Milestone Music

I started back running this week. My ultimate goal is to run a marathon in St. Louis in April 2014, but I'm going to take it slow and just try to hit little goals along the way.

Total mileage this week: 6 (2 miles on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday) It was really hot this week so I'm glad I didn't have a lot of miles to put in. I definitely started SLOW. Despite my turtle's pace, I still collapsed on the driveway for a bit when I got back from my run.

That first run back was super tough. My internal monologue alternated between a couple of "mantras" and an idea to motivate myself to keep running all the way home. One mantra that popped into my head while I was puffing up a long but not particularly steep incline was, "If my lungs can carry me, my legs can carry me." It can also work in the opposite, depending on which part of me is struggling. (It's usually my legs, though.) My other mantra is something I picked up from a Runner's World magazine. It's "You always have enough left to make it up the last hill." This helps mantra comes to me often when I'm struggling up the steep penultimate hill that is less than a half-mile from my house and finds its way into most any route I run from home.

While I was jogging my first two miles in a while and in between mantra-ing myself on a few more steps, I had an idea to mark each extra mile I pick up in my training. Milestone music. Every time I graduate to a mile longer run, (and actually run the whole way), I'll buy a favorite song from iTunes to add to my running playlist. (When I'm training, I like to set a playlist and keep it mostly the same all the way through. It's a comfortable routine for me. I'm not someone who likes to hit the "random" button and see what comes up.) I knew halfway through my first run, that if I made it home, I was going to buy Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" live at Budokan. (And yes, it had to be the live at the Budokan version.) Now, everytime I'm crossing the two mile threshold, I'll know it...whether I'm finishing my run or have 10 more miles to go.

An added benefit to this idea is that I get to mark progress in my pace as well. I always wear a stopwatch when I run, but I usually don't look at it too much. So even though I know when I get home if I ran a route faster or slower than the time before, I will also be able to tell based on my milestone song. In fact, on my third run this week, I never made it to Cheap Trick. I ran my two miles a whole song faster than I did on my first run. I get to move my two-milestone song up in the playlist order. That's a milestone in itself.