Looking for motivation

I can't seem to get my motivation up enough to run at all lately. After putting in over 500 miles between April and October, I bought a treadmill. This has effectively removed the weather from my list of excuses. I just can't get my mind around any sort of running, it's frustrating. I think that having a the marathon goal and Hal's training plan made everything a lot easier, maybe I just need to find a race and start training for it. I have managed to find 15 of the 20 lbs that I lost since April (oops!). I feel like a author with writers-block, I have runners-block.

The whole experiment started out so easy and so simple. I was 28 weeks away from the Chicago marathon when I began, so I did the final 10 weeks of Hal's Spring Tune Up and then went right into the novice marathon program. Looking back, those first 14 weeks were so easy, it is no wonder that I was able to build up my confidence so high. Now that I have seen how hard it is to run 26.2 miles (twice), I am having a much harder time getting that confidence back. It's also kind of frustrating to come to terms with being such a below average runner. I was a two sport (swimming/water polo) high school All-American, accepting that I am a back of that pack runner is not easy. That isn't to say that I only want to do things that I am good at, but it would be nice to believe that qualifying for Boston someday wouldn't be totally impossible. At the rate I went this year, I might as well put that next to qualifying for the Olympics on the shelf of things that are not bloody likely.

I'd like to start running again. I just need to get going, on step at a time. Maybe I'll pull out the old spring tune up schedule or train for a 5k or 10k. Those distances aren't as humbling, and maybe by the time spring roll around I'll have forgotten how bad of a runner I really am. I'll be ready for another go at 26.2.