T-Rex History

I thought I’d throw some notes out there about myself.  First, where did the T-Rex come from?  Firstly when I first started pretending to run I would sometimes look like the proverbial dinosaur with short little arms trotting after some tasty triceratops.

Secondly because of my smaller group I’m quite the older of the lot.

How did I become a #notarunner?

My athletic history for most of my life has been pretty much a roller coaster of peaks and valleys of participation.  More valleys than peaks.   As a kid it was the stereotypical, run around the neighborhood and woods all day till it was too dark to see (no street lights in the tiny little town I grew up in).

Then we moved to a ‘big’ city and for a few years it was fairly quiet on the exertion front then sports came into play, wrestling and football which occupied the school year and part of the summers.

Then it was time to move on and get a job but at the same time I got involved in the fledging sport of Paintball.  So early in the sport that we were still using the same paint that they used to mark trees for cutting down.  Yes, that’s where the paintball came from, marking tools used by lumberjacks and rangers and the like to mark trees.

Paintball involves a lot of running, sprinting really followed by periods of not moving all at random.  A kind of martial fartlek going on.

During this time I also took up running for fun with a good friend of mine.  Together we were able to always prevent the other from just going to the ice cream store instead of running when it was 110F and -10F.  My running was a fairly consistent 25-27 minute 3 mile run 3 times a week, rarely went past that and when I did it was because of some random pretty girl who was amiable to the company on the trail.

Then marriage came and went and came again along with kids the second time and during this time there were moments of lackluster engagment in strength training, weight loss and no running.

It wasn’t until 2 years ago, June 2016, that for a fairly random reasons, the primary one I got a Fenix 3 HR watch which almost demanded that I try to use it for it’s purposes, i.e. tracking running.

To say it was a couch to 5K would be generous.  It was a sleepy sloth to a slow turtle to be honest.

I ran my first 5K 4 months later clocking in a speedy 39 minute run.  But I ran the whole thing without stopping even if my ‘running’ was barely above walking.

2 months later I ran my first 10K in training, not well, on Christmas day.  2 months after that I ran a 10K as a race.  It was during this period that I started running with someone else, my partner in crime on this site who became RW Prime.  At the time I’d been running for about 8 months and she was probably at the same state I was 4 months in.  It didn’t take her long to catch up to me and then of course surpass me.

While at a local running store a pleasant lady by the name of Olga introduced me to the concept of the “Running Spouse”.  And thus T-Rex’s running wife club was formed which has been quite a source of humor.   The only qualification to be a member is you have to run a race with me.  To date this gives me 4 running wives, although one of them, Rabbit, is more honorary because while we ran the same race, it was 1200 miles apart.  I’ve had a shot at a couple of other random wives who approached me during races but we ended up not running together for whatever reasons.

2 months after that I ran my first half marathon.

I didn’t run my first full until March 2018, the Little Rock Marthon 2018.  Prior to that my longest distance was 20 miles, on a day so cold the water froze in our bottles and bladder lines.  Literally froze next to our bodies.

Then 3 months later I ran my first trail run, the Mowdy Mustang Run, in June.  A marathon distance, on trails, in Oklahoma summers.   Not my brightest decision but looking back it was a great experience and certainly pushed me to my limits in keeping moving forward in spite of adversity.

Which brings us to the present and looking back.

In the 2 years 2 months I’ve been running, as of right now I’ve run 2320 miles.  With Run being a pretty generous term, let’s just say that I’ve tracked 2320 training miles over the last 26 months.   That includes a 2 week down time due to injury but other than that every training day I’ve run.  Regardless of temperatures, weather, pain, stress, mental condition, life, work, whatever.  If it’s a run day, I run.

And that I believe is why I continue to run.  Because a run day is the same as a breathing day.  Once you let yourself miss a day, of anything, it doesn’t have to be running, but once you miss a day, the second day is easier to rationalize a reason to miss, the third time is easier until you realize it’s been 3 months since you’ve done whatever it was you were going to do.

My current roadmap is racing against time to reach my goals.  Time is my enemy at my age.  The older you get the harder it gets and I’m starting a bit behind the 8 ball in that regard.

I’m going to attempt a 50K this fall, a 50Mile in Q1 in 2019 (barring major injury) and potentially next fall there’s a race I’d like to try, the Cave Creek Thriller 50K + 30K double.  You run a 50K in the morning and a 30K that evening.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?

I’m not sure when, where, if, a Hundred is in the cards but as Rabbit has stated publicly she’s going to do it with us if and when we do that it certainly adds to the draw.  Although she’ll be bored silly I’m sure at the pace that we’d be doing.