Author: Steve

Water covered the Greenbelt at the beginning Joe Ford Nature Center. We had to climb the fence to get around it.

— Post From My iPhone

Making great time. Not running much. Starting to get a little giddy. Jared and Davi joined for a while and Mark walked/ran a long way with. Down to just Mike, Meg, Ben & Myself plus all the support back home. My calculations were off on the route. The GPS watches show us covering more distance.

— Post From My iPhone

We’re a 3rd of the way thru the route. Ran about 2.5 miles, walked the reat Averaging better than 4 miles an hour. Making much better time than expected. 20235 steps.

— Post From My iPhone

In about 90 minutes I’ll start my journey. I fueled up last night, got a good nights sleep and I’m ready. It looks like I’ve got 3 people committed for the full 50k and I’m going to have about 6 or 7 people start off with me this morning. I’ve also heard from several of my friends that may join me along the way. Thank you Jesus for the beautiful day you have planned. I’ll be tweeting (http://twitter.com/sburton) and blogging along the way, so check back on my progress.

This time next Saturday I’ll be about 2 hours into my route. This will be the first milestone of the day. Up to now, my longest run has been about an hour and 50 minutes. While my 50k50y is going to be more walking than running, 2 hours is still 2 hours.

For this week leading up to my birthday I’m going to focus on just a few things. 1st thing is plenty of rest. I will still be getting in as many steps as I can, but I want to get to bed early and make sure my body (especially my knees) are rested and ready of 10 hours of walking and running. The 2nd thing is my nutrition. I’m going to be on a very strict diet, no fast food this week. Lots of vegetables and low fat protein. I haven’t decided what my Friday night meal will be yet. Carbs are the best choice for long distance walking but I’m not sure how I’ll get them. Maybe spaghetti. Lastly, I’m going to get mentally prepared. When I began this quest the days were warm, I was off 2 days a week and it was easy to run. Now the days are cold and dreary, darkness comes earlier, work is keeping me busy at least 6 days a week. All of this makes it much harder to get motivated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not backing out, I’m going to do this, I just have to get back in the right frame of mind. Get into my summer frame of mind. This last week has helped, we’ve been on fall break. That’s giving me time to clear my desk and take some time off with the family.

So the bottom line is while the reality of this is creeping in and scaring me a little, I’m excited to do this and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the 50 amazing years my family and my God have given me.

I finally have a route I’m happy with. Starting and ending at home, not much retracing of steps, passing some family members homes and places to stop when necessary. ER TOOL –>

A lot of my 50k50y run is going to be on the Owensboro Greenbelt. I want to cover each part of my planned route before the day of the actual run. Early this morning I ran the Horse Fork Trail section of the Greenbelt. Its a beautiful path with a long straight section that follows an old railroad track bed. The hardest part of this section is that the RR section is a steady uphill climb (about 50 feet over 2 miles), but since this is the only section of my 50k50y route where I’m going to double-back I’ll also have a long steady downhill slope to look forward to.

Today was my longest run to date at 8.35 miles. I was pleased with my average pace this morning of 9:40/mile. I also like the Greenbelt’s flat surface compared with the curved road surface of city streets. It’s much easier on my knees. I think I’m going to rework my route to include more of the Greenbelt if possible.

Sunday was stormy so I didn’t run and Monday didn’t look much better. I almost let the weather deter me, glad I didn’t. I ended up running 7.5 miles! I tried out a new route, straight up Frederica Street to the river and back. I never realized how much lower downtown is compared with my end of town, but when I got to 1st Street and looked back up Frederica it looked like was going to have to run up the side of a mountain. It probably wasn’t quite that steep, but after already running about 3.75 miles it sure seemed that steep.

I wasn’t able to run this morning because of a storm rolling through Owensboro. I thought, “no problem, I’ll run after work”.  Well a 5K after sitting on your ass all day is the hardest 5K I’ve ran.  I made it, but I’m sticking to mornings as much as I can.

I got a very encouraging email today from a friend. He was impressed with the progress I’ve made in running. It made me think through why, it seems all of a sudden, running is coming so easy to me. Well the fact is, it’s not really “all of a sudden”.

Last December I set out to lose 60 pounds by my daughter’s wedding at the end of May. Part of my lifestyle change was to start walking, I went from barely walking a mile on a tread mill in January to walking 5 to 7 miles a day by the time daughter got married. From there I just kept walking and walking until one day in late July I walked 15 miles in a day. It’s then that I realized there weren’t enough hours in the day to walk further and keep a full time job so if I wanted to keep increasing my workout I would have to start running. Again, at first, I would run half a mile, then walk a mile, and just kept increasing my running time day after day until one day I just didn’t stop running. It was kind of the opposite of “mind over matter”. My body was ready, but my mind wasn’t. I didn’t think I could run a mile, then I thought I’d never run a 5K, 10K was out of the question 2 weeks ago, now I’m planning a 50K walk/run. I’m no running guru, but I suspect all that walking strengthened my legs and knees so that I was ready to start running.

Maybe the old adage “You have to walk before you can run” is true.