AA sounds like it would be easier...

Last night at our running clinic, we had a special guest speaker who talked to us about repetitive sports injuries.  Basically, he summed up why some people get hurty in bits when they run, while others don't. He pointed out tiny imbalances or self corrections can really mess up your running style. I hadn't really thought about it, but yeah, when you favor one leg over the other or pull to one side or have one leg shorter or are stronger on one side, your body will naturally compensate for it and over time, this can lead to injury. Good stuff, albeit a bit scary!

The part that got me the most though was when he pointed out that for a half marathon, if a runner has a stride of one meter (yeah, that's pretty big, but for simplicity's sake, let's use it) then a half marathon is TWENTY ONE THOUSAND STEPS.  Even a piddly 5K is five thousand steps! This totally blew my mind. Yes, this is probably why my legs were killing me at the end of our 16K on Sunday.  This is probably also why it can sometimes be really REALLY hard to drag oneself out of bed on a Sunday at 8am when you know you have to take 16000 steps before you get to eat pancakes.  I found myself running hills last night saying "HOW MANY STEPS?!?!" to myself as I puffed up the hill, mind short circuiting over and over, and it even distracted me from how tired I was getting.

I guess what it boils down to is that yes, it IS a lot of steps to finish a race. Twenty one thousand steps is a lot and the first ones can be tough to get started. And the number of steps you'll take while training for a race is insane, but they can be done. And unfortunately the cliche of "one step at a time" totally applies here. Personally, I'm trying to break them down into little steps at the front end (just 100 more steps, you can do it, 100 steps only takes like 3 minutes) and then marvelling over how awesome I am at the end of it.  What did I do today? I took 5000 steps before 7am!  I won't tell you how long they took, the important part is that I did it, and yeah, it was one step at at time. Let the sappy music play!