Karen Leverages Strength Training To Help Her Running Feel Better!

Over the years, I have always stayed fairly active. Being a cardio junkie, I started running in college, have always attended aerobic and spinning classes, did a lot (across the country two times) of road riding during my twenties, and played a ton of Ultimate Frisbee, especially in my thirties.  I would play an average of 7 games over the course of a weekend at a tournament, running and sprinting for the hour and a half of each game.

For more than 5 years now, life has become incredibly  full with responsibilities.  Working a full time, traveling sales job, taking care of my elderly mother, being a mom, managing our house – all of this had become overwhelmingly consuming and I was only running a few times a week.  At this point, my runs were more about mental health but none of it was feeling very good.  I hadn’t had that “runners high” feeling in a long time.

I wasn’t sure how I could fit in yet another obligation, but clearly needed some direction  so decided to make a 3 month, once a week commitment to work with DJ at Limitless Fitness.  My goal was to simply feel better during and after my runs.

With the weekly strength training routines, DJ’s support of assisting in building my weekly running schedule, and overall guidance, it didn’t take long to reach my goal. This initial goal of simply feeling better quickly morphed into a second goal to run a half marathon, which I hadn’t done in a handful of years. My focus was to complete it in under 2 hours.  I ran a local half marathon in October and achieved this goal.  We weren’t done after this. Next step was to focus a little more on speed, run one more half marathon, and complete it in a faster time.  I ran a half marathon on a cold day this month of December and accomplished this last milestone.

If I hadn’t made this commitment to work with DJ, I wouldn’t have completed these races like I did. On top of DJ’s knowledge in running, conditioning and strength building, working with DJ has also helped me regain a focus which had been extremely challenging to do before.

-Karen