Jose Garcia – The man behind the shorts
In preparation for the marathon, Jose Garcia M´15 (or negro as we all know him) ran more this winter than the T!
Tuesday afternoon after the marathon, Jose felt his legs sore from running the 26 miles of the Boston marathon in an amazing 2h 42 minutes. Monday morning had been a tough one. Not only did he have a delicious power breakfast (he had three salted potatoes in order to get enough energy but not feel heavy), but the weather was against all runners and on top of that he left his training watch at home. This was a major mistake, since the watch is an important tool he uses to track his speed and pace himself during the run.
Jose had trained hard all winter and decided to forget all about the watch and enjoy his run. He knew that his wife and all of his friends were watching and expecting to see him run with a smiley face–and we did! Having his friends cheering up for him at different parts of the marathon gave him a push to keep running.
Jose against the winter: Preparation for the marathon
Rumor says that in his high school gym classes Jose would outran his peers by 2 soccer court laps. Five years ago, Jose started running half marathons and marathons with a group of 40 people coached by 3 trainers. For the Boston marathon Jose started training seriously by the end of January and his trainers supported him by sending him training plans.
One of his biggest challenges was training in (in despite of ) the winter. He had to run 6 days a week, covering a certain amount of miles. However since on some days he wasn’t able to run he had to compensate the miles in his other training runs. This meant having longer run or in some cases training twice a day.
Finding a time to train was challenging. In winter there is light from 8am to 5pm, so there was not much time to train during the day. Apart from this, Jose was busy finishing his MBA, completing his GA hours and he is also about to be a father! For this reason, most of his training took place after class. As we all know, the majority of our classes are from 6.30pm to 9.00pm, so Jose trained from 10.00pm to 12.30pm or 1.00am. He then took a quick shower, some dinner and ended up going to bed by 2.00am.
Some days it was really cold, so he had to train with a lot of clothes, the roads were icy and it was difficult to run as fast as he needed. He found Beacon Street to be the best place to train as it was one of the fastest ones to get clean after each storm. Apart from this, it had a specific path for bikes which made it runner friendly in the dark night. He also stayed safe by using reflective jackets.
But don´t worry too much about Jose, there is a lot of Nutella involved!
There is some good news: The marathon diet. During his training he didn’t pay much attention to what he ate. However, during the last week he ate a lot of pasta, bananas, fish and vegetables. He ate at least one banana a day, and the last three days he almost only ate pasta, salted potatoes and a lot of bread with Nutella (Nutella has protein, energy and helps the body stay active).
During the race he took 7 energetic gels (his favorite flavors are Strawberry + banana and blueberry).
For the people who want to start running
His advice for those who want to start running is to start and enjoy. According to Jose´s experience, running helps you get to know a city in ways you usually would not. You discover new amazing places and you get to go to a lot of parks. It also helps to have a group to train and share the experience.
For Jose´s fans: When is he going to run the next marathon?
First of all he needs to recover. He plans to get a massage, take a walk and take it easy for the next 15 days.
Now, taking into account that his son is about to be born in the next couple of weeks, he will probably wait until the first semester of 2016 (Maybe he´ll run the Boston marathon next year!) Meanwhile he plans to run half marathons in Bogotá and Medellín.