Every year for the past five, I have set myself a goal on my birthday; I try to run as many laps around the track at Robert Bateman Secondary School as I am years old. (I have to give credit to Vince Van Dyk for this idea.) Since passing the \u201chalf-century\u201d mark, this is becoming a pretty big deal. This year, it meant running slightly more than a half marathon.<\/p>\n
I chose to run on Monday, November 13; a day close to my birthday and a day off from school. It takes me close to two hours, so I need a day that isn\u2019t too booked up with work and other activities. Now, I am a fairly regular runner, but I usually don\u2019t run for more than 45 minutes or 10 kilometers. This means that running over 22 kilometers is a little out of my comfort zone!<\/p>\n
If you recall, Monday, November 13 was a rather windy and rainy day. A strong wind out of the south was gusting to what felt like a hurricane.<\/strong><\/span> Quite honestly, I considered counting double during a few laps because I was running into what turned out to be a 35 kilometer headwind for more than 100 meters at a time.<\/p>\n For some reason, laps 14, 25 and 32 were especially difficult. The wind was really gusting (yes, I actually tracked that!). I managed to tough those laps out by telling myself these laps were early on and I should be just warming up by lap 30.<\/p>\n That worked okay until I got to lap 40. That\u2019s when I realized that my legs were tightening up and I still had more than a dozen laps to go.<\/p>\n Somewhere around lap 45, I started thinking about what we tell our students. Perseverance involves a choice.<\/strong><\/span> If completing this run was important to me, then I had to choose to complete it.<\/p>\n An app on my phone that tracks my time and distance, so I set a secondary goal of running my laps with an average speed of under five minutes per kilometer. This was relatively easy for the first ten kilometers, but by the time I was on lap 40, or kilometer 16, this was becoming a stressor for me.<\/p>\n My speed was beginning to drop and with it, my resolve.<\/p>\n I even started humming our ACS theme song from a few years back, \u201cEvery Giant will Fall.\u201d My stride suddenly fell into the same rhythm as my humming. By lap 50, I knew things were going to be okay and I even picked up the pace for my final kilometer.<\/p>\n I finished my run in exactly 1 hour and 42 minutes and 28 seconds with an average of 4 minutes and 50 seconds per kilometer. Well inside my target of sub-five minutes per kilometer!<\/p>\n Walking home from the track, I was pleased with my effort;\u00a0thankful for the Advil and ice bath waiting for me at home.<\/span><\/strong> I was also thinking what this would feel like next year when, the Lord willing, I would add one more lap to my run.<\/p>\n I will need even more perseverance!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every year for the past five, I have set myself a goal on my birthday; I try to run as many laps around the track at Robert Bateman Secondary School as I am years old. (I have to give credit to Vince Van Dyk for this idea.) Since passing the \u201chalf-century\u201d mark, this is becoming […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":3519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,34],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-3514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character","category-middle-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3514"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=3514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Humming in stride<\/span><\/h2>\n