Tales from DC: National Half Marathon

Me, the day after. Plenty of energy and stamina, but some joint soreness.

I've come a long way.

I'm too goal-oriented for my own good, and I don't often glance back to see where I started.

I've struggled to be athletic when I was younger. As a kid with childhood asthma, I was benched the entire year I was in little league soccer. It doesn't help that I also was born with a leg twisted funny so I tended to trip over myself when running. Of course the only way to fix problems like that is to, well, run anyway. But that's hard to do when you're sitting on the bench.

After soccer, bless my parents, they put in martial arts. Turns out the next best thing for leg twisted like mine was to do a lot of kicking. I did a lot of kicking. I kept the inhaler in the sensei's office desk and it took some time to ween myself off of it. I used to have to use it two or three times during a one-hour class. Gradually, I got to where I only needed it once. I remember the day when I took it out the last time--very out of breath and ready to use it. But I decided I didn't need it. I finished the class and felt mildly proud when I finished the class without needing to use it. I didn't tell my parents, or anyone really.

I joined track in high school because my friends were doing it and because there were pretty girls and because my friends made me realize I should be doing a sport where you got to hang out with pretty girls. At first I threw disc and shotput which made no sense because all the rest of the guys were linebackers and I, well, wasn't a linebacker. But then I got into doing 4x400 relays and fell in love with running.

I took a considerable break from it when Mimi and I moved to DC. Balancing fulltime work and fulltime graduate school is crazy by the way. But since I've restarted, it was with the goal of working up to a marathon at some point. Halfway there!

The National Half was a good race. I was warned to train hills, but I thought that was ridiculous (this is DC! What hills?!). Apparently there are quite a few. So some soreness in my ankles but no blisters and no other soreness.