To 26.2 or Not to 26.2?

When I signed up for the 2011 Boston Marathon, I thought that I was just checking an item off my bucket list. But somewhere during the training process, I convinced myself that not only could I run a marathon, I was a marathon runner.

Following Boston, I set my sights on Marine Corp Marathon for 2012. I wanted something in the fall, it has a great reputation, and it has personal meaning to because my brother-in-law and his brother were Marines. But now that registration is in a few days, I’m having second thoughts.

Training for a marathon is probably the most rewarding thing I have ever done. But it took a lot out of me.  I got up at 5:30am most weekdays, did some sort of intense workout, went to work, got home around 8, and tried to get in bed as fast as possible. I was constantly tired from this schedule, and my social life was limited by the strict nature of the schedule. In February and March, there were a grand total of 2 nights when I stayed up past midnight, and 1 night when I set foot in a bar (where I drank water the entire night). I had exactly zero dates during this time. By the time I started my taper, I could barely even breathe thanks to a sinus infection that turned into a lung one due beating up my body for all those months.

And during this time, I was lucky to not be busy at work.

My concern with signing up this year is that between work and various family/life commitments, I have spent most of 2012 feeling like I have the weight of the world riding on my shoulders. I wake up in the morning, look at the pile of dirty clothes I haven’t had time to put away, and wish the world would just slow down its spin for a few minutes so I could catch up. Then I go to the office, where 15 different people want something different from me at all times. I’m scheduled to second-chair a trial in April, which means the next two months are not going to get any better—in fact, they will probably be worse.

On the other hand, while sometimes my workout schedule may make me appear to the world as insane, it is what keeps me sane. When I enter the gate to Central Park, I feel like I leave the world behind me. Running lifts the weight off my shoulders and helps me process the stress. The one thing I see when I wake up in the morning before the pile of clothes is this Adidas marathon-themed ad on my wall that reads “First you feel like dying, then you feel reborn.” It’s there because that is exactly what a marathon feels like, and thinking of that feeling every morning makes me smile.

The other consideration weighing on me is that as a woman who wants to have children someday, I don’t think I have many marathon running years left in the near future. I know that there are people who push themselves to run while pregnant or not long after childbirth, but I have no desire to put my body through that (particularly given the demands my job will likely place on my time as well). Maybe I’ll come back to marathon running later in life, but at least as the plans work in my head, I have maybe 3 more marathons in me before I transition to a different stage in life (although, Cupid has been giving me some rather raw deals lately, so perhaps I have more than I think).

So, there is a serious dilemma in my mind: do I make the big commitment, knowing that it will be an exhausting summer/fall but that I will be devoting myself to something that I love, or do I take it easy and focus on other things?

At the moment, I’m still leaning toward signing up. I did a 4-mile race on Saturday, and when I hit the 3-mile marker, my immediate reaction was disappointment that there was only one more.  The truth is, I’m not happy unless I’m challenging myself. And there’s no challenge like 26.2.