Sometimes training for a marathon can be a drag. It’s challenging and often difficult to begin one’s day knowing that a long run is coming – an hour (often more) of strenuous exercise, out there on the streets alone, often hurting, sometimes painfully so. Marathon training is certainly not fun.

And yet, we go on day-after-day, year-after-year preparing for race-after-race, thinking, hoping , wondering, even decades removed from one’s prime, if this race, the next race, will be the best one ever. (“I wonder if I can set a P.R.?”)

Note – For the record, I set my P.R. in 2006. Those days are long gone, but it is part of the mind of an athlete to think that maybe, just maybe, with the right training, and a few lucky breaks that, maybe, just maybe, we can be what we once were…

Training for a marathon can be hard work.

Training for a marathon IS hard work.

Last week, I completed the first of my 16 weeks of training. Truth be told, I’m always in some type of training mode. I don’t take a break from running. But, I ratchet it all up, bit-by-bit, in the sixteen weeks before the big race. The New York City Marathon is on the not-so-distant horizon and I need to be ready!

When one runs as often as I do, the streets around home can get tedious. I’ve run them all a million times. Over and over.

Marathon training, in many ways, becomes a job. Day after day, week after week, one has to get the job done or the results won’t be there.

We might love our jobs. I loved mine. (Before I retired, I was the principal of the most wonderful school that anyone could ever imagine.) But work is work. And work isn’t always fun. It often isn’t. Work is hard and demanding and it never lets up. It’s unforgiving. It’s stressful.

Work might have some fun aspects to it, but it isn’t always fun. It might be rewarding, but it isn’t always so.

I have always found that one key to success (there are many) is to find ways to make work more fun. I try to find ways to make work less like work.

No matter how wonderful a job might be, they call it work for a reason. Work is work. To do a job well requires great effort, great focus, great dedication, and more.

In regard to running, I have found a way to make it all fun again… (Or, at least more fun.)

A few weeks ago I shared that I found a site called City Strides where I was able to track all my runs at home in Wyckoff, New Jersey. I set out to run each and every street in Wyckoff. There are 362 streets in all. I never imagined it was that many. But there are, and after some long sustained and tough runs, I completed the town.

Mapping out the routes to run on all the roads was fun. I ran on streets I had never gone down before. I saw my town in a way I had never seen it. (I also found out where all the Little Free Libraries are. I love finding good books to read!)

The goal of completing Wyckoff added a new dimension to my training. I didn’t love every run, but I did love the challenge of working to complete the town, and I loved the process of figuring out where I’d run and how I’d cover every street.

But, once I completed Wyckoff, after feeling like I accomplished something, I felt empty. I thought, “Now what?”

The “What” became Midland Park, the town I grew up in, which, thankfully, is right next to Wyckoff. Two weeks ago, I set out to cover every one of the 138 streets in Midland Park.

Midland Park is a much smaller town than Wyckoff. I was able to cover the entire town (minus the streets that I had already run on) with just seven long runs:

• July 12: 5 miles
• July 17: 7 miles
• July 18: 8.6 miles
• July 21: 11 miles
• July 22: 9.15 miles
• July 24: 10.0 miles
• July 25: 5.0 miles

I finished Midland Park yesterday.

Now I need another challenge. And that challenge is right next door again – Hawthorne, New Jersey.

In my running I have previously completed only 17 of the 236 streets in Hawthorne. This one is going to be tough. Hawthorne is a big town that also has some of the steepest and most unforgiving hills in the area. (Thank goodness I have done some, but certainly not all, of them already.)

I think trying to complete all of Hawthorne will take me a few months, but, so will my marathon training. This year, instead of training on the same roads with the same running routes, the same way, I have a new way to prepare for the big race. I’m making this work fun. I’m making a game out of the long run.

Sometimes all it takes to make something that is tedious tolerable, or even fun, is a little creativity.