I’d like to revisit a club that I joined this year, that I previously blogged about – the USC Marathon Team. Membership opens every fall, and we train for the following months in preparation for the LA Marathon, which is usually in March of every year. You can read a bit about this club in my previous post last semester. I’ll elaborate a bit more about how my involvement with the team this semester has been!
This semester we amped up the mileage for our long Sunday runs. We started out at 12 miles, then progressed to 14 miles going south along the coast to Redondo Beach, 16 miles from Santa Monica to UCLA and back, 18 miles at Palos Verdes, 20 miles from Dockweiler Beach to Palos Verdes and back, and hit an all-time high of 22 miles along the coast stretching up to Malibu. In the next 2 weeks we will be decreasing our mileage to let our bodies rest a bit before the big 26.2 (14 miles tomorrow and 8 the following week)!!
The lightpost I ran past on our Palos Verdes run.
For these long runs we all meet on campus at 6:30am or 7am on Sunday (for the 22 miler, we met at 6am) and all carpool over to the designated site. We all start off at the same time, and we all run at our own pace. As we finish, we dig into the snacks with high glycemic indexes after our long runs that the coaches bring for us. This is always so great; you get to relax, eat, and observe the beautiful view of the ocean. Normally we get back to campus anytime 11-noon depending on the mileage. The long runs always eat into my Sundays, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!
Being on a team offers great accountability; oftentimes I wonder to myself whether I would be able to push myself to run 22 miles straight – having other people going through the same toils and struggles with me makes it a lot more bearable!
It has also given me a sense of camaraderie – I’ve met some great people of all different majors and different long term plans. It’s always so interesting to chat with my friends and hearing their stories.
Plus, this club has allowed me the opportunity to see so much more of southern California than I would have otherwise! In the past few months, I’ve witnessed such gorgeous views, and running by the beach still is surreal at times. And having other members with cars helping out to carpool the rest of us from the long Sunday run distances is SUPER helpful for me since I don’t have a car on campus.
The other night we all went out to dinner in Little Tokyo at a place called Zip Fusion – all expenses paid by the team! We had calamari, shrimp rolls, spicy tuna tempura, Philadelphia roll, rainbow roll, shrimp tempura, beef, and a chicken salad. For dessert, I picked mango mochi – it was so delicious! At the end we all took a team photo of us – see below.
https://twitter.com/CassGabara/status/308046218389491712
I’m so glad I made the leap to join this club (I was debating it for the longest time in the fall) and took the great challenge of climbing to 26.2 miles. I’ll let you guys know how the Marathon goes! 15 days and counting!
Catch you guys later,
Cassandra
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