Day 2: How I chose Half-Marathons

I have 3 sisters and no brothers (well, no blood related brothers, but I do have one brother-in-law). I'm second. We currently span the ages of 19-31. Sister #1 lives with her husband in Brooklyn. They're self-proclaimed vagabonds and love to travel. New York City is their current adventure. Sisters #3 and #4 live in McKenzie, TN where they both attend Bethel University. I'm outside of Atlanta. There is one time per year that we're guaranteed a visit home that includes all 4 of us, and that is Christmas. Not Christmas Day, necessarily, but the Christmas "season". Other than that, I'll try to make it back to Nashville during the summer with the littles are home from school, or my older sister and BIL will come through Atlanta to visit their best friends and I'll get to see them then.

So we talked one day. The four of us. And we decided that we wanted to do something that would allow us to intentionally see each other at a time that wasn't Christmas. We also discussed how out of shape we all were and how we wanted to do something that would be good for us and fun too. So we settled on half-marathons. We thought it would be unrealistic to try and schedule one every year, so we decided on every two years, with the first one being in 2014. Since we are currently still in 2013, I cannot tell you yet if our plan worked. I'm on schedule to do a half every other year because I ran my first one last November in 2012. I've finally coerced the littles into training for something, and the three of us will run a 15K in January, but there are 11 whole other months after that for the 4 of us to fit in a half-marathon. We talked about trying to take a trip somewhere to run it. That way, we'd see each other for a weekend and be able to split hotel costs 4 ways and see new places. Or if it was a year that we needed to save money, we'd meet in a place where one of us lives so we wouldn't have hotel costs. There are exceptions written into our deal for sickness, pregnancy, new babies, and other various life events that would prevent someone from traveling or running 13.1 miles. [Side note: if one of us had a newborn, I'm pretty sure the other three of us could travel to that person and run there. I'm SURE that could be arranged.]

Anyway...that's the plan. We figured it's good for us. 13.1 miles isn't too terribly hard on your body, and it doesn't take forever to train for that distance. It's also good for us emotionally because if you have sisters, you know...sometimes you just need your sisters. Hopefully, we can convince Sister #1 to start training too, because as of January, the other three of us will be running 9.3 miles, and that's not so far from 13.1. :)


This post is a part of The Nester's 31 Days blogging project. Click here to see the directory of all 31 posts related to my topic: 31 Days to Retraining.