From Couch to Conquerer: Training for a Half Marathon

A lot of you are probably wondering how a guy my size gets up one day and decides to do a 1/2 marathon and then goes ahead and does it. Simple, I found an expert and made a plan. I have found in this life that if you want anything to go right you need to seek out advice from people who have been there and done that. When I was a young soldier my Dad gave me some sage advice. He told me to listen to my top sergeant and follow his direction as if it were the word of God. Good advice that I still use to this day.

When I started out on this quest for the 1/2 I weighed in at 520 pounds. I was so miserable and I could hardly walk. The thing that I had though was grit and determination. To me that is the key to any training program and finally attacking the long run, being determined! You know that this is not going to be easy, you know that this going to require effort, and you know that there are times you are going to feel pain. But you also know that you can do anything you set your mind too. That is not rah-rah BS stuff, that is real.

Any good Woolly Mammoth will tell you that you start slow, keep it moderate, and when you need to push it, you push it. That is what I did. I started off by running for 30 seconds and then walking for four minutes and thirty seconds, a total of five minutes. Now I was exhausted by that five minutes but I found that I also wanted to do another five minutes and it was this determination that kept me motivated.

Now this process is not pretty and you are going to have to deal with all sorts of issues. Especially dealing with injury. That will be the focus of my next post.

Welcome to the Herd

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Woolly Mammoth Runner blog. My name is Mark Evans and I just completed two huge things in my life. First, I was on a weight loss reality program called Heavy that will be on A&E this coming January. Second, I ran my first 1/2 marathon and it is this part that this blog will be concerned with. Being a larger man (at the writing of this I am at 355 lbs.) running is a lot harder than it is for our slenderer brethren of the road. So our challenges are different and how we approach our distance runs is different than the speedsters.

It is my intention to use this blog as a way for me to explain how I am approaching my distance runs, training, strategies, equipment, so on and so forth that the heavier runner has to deal with. My first blog will be on training and how I went from a couch potato to 1/2 marathoner in six months.