Tomorrow I'll be running my 15th half-marathon

I'll try to beat my personal best of 1:17:22

Me and Baghdad Rachem, after a 5k race a month ago. (my bib number was wrong, so I had to pen one)

I've been running an average of 2 half-marathons a year since 2009. My best performances are 1:17:22 and 1:17:31. I finished in 6th and 14th place of the Quebec City Marathon and Montreal Marathon respectively. This was in 2015. There were more than 14,000 participants in the Montreal half-marathon that year. I was running a mile in 00:05:54 or a kilometer in 00:03:39.

Three weeks ago, I drove to Montreal. I was going to see my coach Abdoul. I meet him after a race where I finish second and he finished first, 7 minutes ahead of me. He’s only been coaching me for a couple of weeks and been helping me so much already. Anyway, I got there running late. There, I meet his Kenyan friend. His marathon PB is 2:08 something.

The 4th fastest marathon time by an American runner is 2:08:37 by Meb Keflezighi in 2014 at the Boston Marathon. Intrigued, I asked him: «Are you doing the Kenyan Olympic team?” He answered, no and added, at least 300 Kenyans are running 2:08 and 200 are doing 2:07. He is training to get even faster. The world record is 2:02:57. It was set in berlin in 2014. In the last 12 years the world record has been beaten 6 times, all in berlin, by 1 Ethiopians 2 times and 4 Kenyans.

He also told me he was pacing for the Ottawa Marathon in May. He had to keep a pace of a 2:14:00 marathon for 30k. It pays him a couple thousands of dollars and it can reach in the tens of thousands. He was pacing there for the Canadian runners who aim at making the Canadian Olympic team. It takes 2:14, possibly a bit better, to make the team.

I won’t ever be running close to this. I run for fun. I love it. It is also very healthy. Here’s one very interesting snippet from a NY times article reporting on a study.

Those rats that had jogged on wheels showed robust levels of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue teemed with new neurons, far more than in the brains of the sedentary animals. The greater the distance that a runner had covered during the experiment, the more new cells its brain now contained.

There were far fewer new neurons in the brains of the animals that had completed high-intensity interval training. They showed somewhat higher amounts than in the sedentary animals but far less than in the distance runners.

And the weight-training rats, although they were much stronger at the end of the experiment than they had been at the start, showed no discernible augmentation of neurogenesis. Their hippocampal tissue looked just like that of the animals that had not exercised at all.

Obviously, rats are not people. But the implications of these findings are provocative. They suggest, said Miriam Nokia, a research fellow at the University of Jyvaskyla who led the study, that “sustained aerobic exercise might be most beneficial for brain health also in humans.”

I can’t wait to be on the starting line, tomorrow.

I can’t wait to reach the finish line, also.

Sure, I will suffer in between the 2, but what would be life without challenges.

JFK once said:

”We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Most of my stats.
Abdoul's stats (he finish 3rd in Montreal's Marathon last year)