Fighting With a Lion

First blog entry, here goes! This blog is going to be about my training for the Scotiabank Toronto marathon on October 14th. My goal this year is to run under the 3h5min standard to qualify for the Boston Marathon in April. I've been following the recommended training schedule from the Scotiabank website (http://www.torontowaterfrontmarathon.com/en/training-schedule-marathon-run-310.htm), and it's tough, long, and pretty lonely! So I wanted to find a way to try and unload the hours of solitary work out of my own head and into a place I can remember it later. And I've always loved reading other people's blogs about stuff they love, so hopefully if you read this you'll enjoy it!

I titled my blog 'Fighting With A Lion' because of an article I read about the great Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie, in which a competing runner describes racing against Haile as being "like fighting with a lion". So if you imagine taking on the challenge of fighting with a lion, here are some points that might come to mind: 1) You're not designed to do it. Your body doesn't want to fight a lion. It's made for fighting things your own size. So too with running hard for hours, you're subjecting your body to stress that it isn't used to accommodating. 2) If you make excuses for not sticking to your task, your results will suffer. Fighting a lion, the results of your goal to survive suffer (as do your limbs). Miss a workout, with good reason or not, and you've missed that opportunity to improve. Necessary rest days count as workouts in this case... 3) You're most intimidated when you're about to start. 4) Your adversary will always have more strength and bigger paws, but it's always possible to reach your goal! It IS possible to fight a lion to the death by hand. It's not LIKELY, and I dunno HOW, but in principle it IS possible. So too with training, if you set the ultimate goal of training perfectly all the time, you'll probably slip up here and there, but it's a good goal to strive for. 5) And finally (this is less of an analogy, more of a tribute to Haile), you have to admire how good lions are at fighting. Imagine training until you became that powerful! So too with Haile, look him up, he's pushed himself and seen legendary results that have cemented him as one of the greatest athletes in history. There's nothing fake about Haile running, or lion fighting. They can't trick the public into thinking they're talented, the way celebrities and politicians sometimes can. When you're running a marathon, or fighting a lion, there's nothing fake. You put your heart and sweat into the wild, hot task ahead, and stick with it with everything you've got until you're finished. Dig deep, find the courage and just give 'er!

I'll be back with an update of how training's going soon :) Please do let me know any advice you have for me!