A Guide to Training During Your Menstrual Cycle.
Her Could Women Be Hardwired for Endurance Events first began in Hawaii in 2012. She was 29, unsure of what she wanted to do with her life, but sure that she wanted to do something amazing.
After determining that she needed a fresh start, she left her job as a tennis coach and after-school teacher in an impoverished area of San Francisco, and bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii. She started to run, unconnectedly though she had set out on what was meant to be a yearlong surfing trip around the Pacific Rim, she needed to fill the hours she wasn’t in the water, to create some additional structure to her days that were not filled, for the first time since college, with hours of work. On her first training run, she met Steve Williams, a family friend and a top age-group marathoner, and following a speedy test run around Honolulu’s Ala Moana Park, he told her he was impressed, and most importantly saw Olympic potential. He began to coach her, charting goals and planning workouts for the Honolulu Marathon, her first major race.
Kara had always had dreams of the Olympics, but she never imagined that she’d get there by running. As a child in Chicago, she played at a tennis academy. She holds Filipino citizenship and competed on their national tennis team in high school; in college at Stanford University, she was part of three NCAA championship teams. After two shoulder surgeries, she began to box, and at one point in her life she thought that she could box her way to an Olympic team.
At the moment, however, running seems to be her best chance for the worldwide competition and she is chasing down the 2:43 that she needs in order to qualify for the Philippine Olympic team. Her PR after the 2014 California International Marathon in Sacramento was 3:22; her previous PR was 3:30. Kara realizes that these times probably mean that she will not be competing in Rio 2016, since she needs to cut more than 30 minutes off her PR in just over a year.
Currently, she is writing about her training goals while working as a CA Notice at Collection, filing regular sports columns as she continues on her journey. She’s also on Twitter @karambutan where she tweets about her experiences.
Rio may be a goal that is slipping away for 2016, but instead of throwing in the towel, she is setting her sights on earning a spot for the 2020 games. She’s consistently chipping away at finishing times, and she knows that if she continues to put in the effort, that 2:43 is more than attainable. Will Tokyo 2020 be the year that the Philippines finally sends a woman to run the marathon? She sure hopes so, and more importantly, she hopes that woman is named Kara Guzman.
Megan Birch-McMichael is a 35 year old writer raising two small children in the woods of Massachusetts along with her amazingly brilliant PhD of a husband. She loves to run incredibly long distances, to knit intricate things for tiny humans, and to write about her life experiences at anatomyofamother.tumblr.com.
