I think it was back in August that we all began talking about running in the Hirosaki Apple Marathon. Myself, Tori, Kimberly, and Ayu were sitting around and Ayu brought up the idea. I said that I had always wanted to run in a marathon, but never got up the guts to do it. I know, I know… I lived in Austin, Texas and they have marathon events literally all the time… But I had never done it. So I thought to myself,
“Hey Stacy! You’re in Japan! Let’s try new crazy things! How about running a 10k?”
I had no real perception of what it would be like to run a 10k, but why the heck not?
Ayu signed us all up on the website. A 10k (6.2 mi) is about the furthest you can run without truly going insane and pulling a half-marathon (13 mi/21 km) or a full-marathon (26 mi/42 km). And the 3k and 5k just seemed way too easy. I wanted a challenge! Maybe it was that former competitive athlete in me talking…
After the four of us signed up, I learned that our other ALT friends Mike and Claire were going to run with us too. We had a team! Tori came up with the idea to design a shirt and have it professionally printed by some friends. It was totally Tori’s design (creative people are awesome!) and the color was awesome because we had no trouble picking ourselves out in the crowds of runners.
I imagined that I should do some sort of training to get ready for the longest run I’d ever attempted in my life. Tori was totally hard-core about getting an actual training regimen and Kimberly was already a devoted runner, so… I just thought I would get in the habit of running as much as I could to build up some running muscles. This sounded like a reasonable goal to me.
This however was thwarted when I fell deathly ill with the worst cold ever only two weeks before the race. Spent the first week basically in bed and the next week still recovering. I think I made it out to run about twice in those two weeks before the race. Whoops… I wondered how I would feel on race day, with my cough lingering and my nose still running. It was a little hard to breathe sometimes with the cough and I got winded easily. I didn’t have very high expectations for myself, so I was just there to do the best I could.