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My Journey |  |
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I guess I’ve always had an admiration for runners maybe from watching the Olympics. I was very non-athletic in school. I played basketball one year in grade school. But I remember during recess in middle school running around a basketball court (very slowly). I didn’t do anything in high school. In college, I started playing some sports and took several sport classes as free electives.
After college, I got involved in volleyball, serious volleyball; and I started working out some. But I knew that all the jumping and landing in volleyball was hard on my knees so running was out of the question, but I did do some bicycle riding.
After I retired from competitive volleyball in 1994, I continued to work out and ride mostly a stationary bike at the gym. These bikes were on the second floor overlooking the treadmills. Eventually the lure of running got me onto the treadmill. My knees didn’t explode so I continued to build some mileage up to about 10 miles per week.
I ran my first 5K race in 2005. Over the next few years I ran an occasional 5K race, while running usually less than 10 miles a week. In 2013 I made a New Year's resolution to run more races. That's when I got more serious and joined the Dallas Running Club.
In my first race with the DRC, I won a third place medal in my age group. I got really excited about running and figured I was hot stuff. That is until I realized that there were only four participants in my age group. Then for some reason I looked at the 70-74 year old age group and discovered that I would have finished near the bottom of that group. But, I was still pumped and even more determined to improve.
After some encouragement from running friends, I started training on my own for my first half marathon. With my engineering background I like to figure out how things work and to solve problems. Also, being a Boy Scout leader for 22 years I've learned to always "Be Prepared" so I did (and still do) a lot of research and experimenting.
I survived my first half marathon … barely. It wasn’t a very good experience. I made ALL the beginning runner mistakes.
So in 2014, I joined a training group with the DRC and started training with them. My group was made up of very diverse individuals with similar running abilities. Our pace leader and coach, Debbie Van Winkle, has taught me a lot and is a great mentor. We had a training schedule developed for us by a Road Runners Club of America certified coach and I tried to stick to it carefully. I had a much better experience with my next half. Being consistent and carefully following a good Training Plan is the most important way to accomplish your running goals. The second most helpful thing for me was training with a group.
Training with a group has many advantages and I highly recommend it. It makes you accountable and makes the miles pass easier and more quickly. Having a conversation while running makes you run at the correct pace for an easy, recovery, or long run. You develop a lot of good friendships and can encourage and help each other. I can go a lot further and train a lot harder when I am with my group.
In 2015, my running club asked me to be a pace leader which I eagerly accepted. I enjoy pacing a group, teaching them, and helping them attain their goals. I love to help others succeed!
The group I help to pace is the 2:30 half marathon group. This is an entry level group as it is the slowest all running group, slower groups are walk/run. So we get a lot of people who are training for their very first distance race. This is typically one of the largest groups in the training program with 50 or more people. So there are plenty of opportunities to teach and plenty of opportunities to celebrate milestones with them. I am very thankful to Debbie Van Winkle for being my mentor for running, trail running, and being a pace leader.
Whoever said, “If you want to learn something … teach it,” was SO wise.
As I prepared to be a pace leader, the process of organizing my thoughts and writing them down helped me to not only learn the information better, but put the things I’d learned into practice. It’s also motivated me to experiment and try to learn more, figure out what works and what doesn’t work. I’ve learned a lot from myself and from others and put that into practice.
I completed my first marathon in December 2016. The conditions were less than ideal being warm, humid, and windy so it wasn't pretty, but I was happy to finish. You can see my lessons learned at Marathon and Beyond.
I created this website to help me organize and document what I have learned. Developing these pages has helped me a lot because the best way to learn something is to teach it. These pages are also a handy reference for the people in my pace group.
