Tuesday, July 28, 2015

My road to NYC!

Okay, I just hit a button  on my computer and my whole post disappeared , I had just written that I woke up in a funk  and that little incident did not help my , already not so great, mood!  How does one wake up in a bad mood?  Could be because I overslept , by just enough, to not be able to get my run in.  That always irritates me, I never use an alarm, just wake up when I should, usually!  My kind of weather too, love the heat, even the humidity.  I know, I know, I am one of those weird personalities that thrive in this kind of weather.  When others are running for the air conditioning I am sitting in the sun, or on the front porch , reading a book.  If I run early in the morning, I love the feeling when I get home with sweat streaming down my back....I feel energized.  Definitely live in the wrong part of the country, where 6 of our months are winter, but maybe if I had this weather all the time I would not enjoy it as much.

I am now training for the NYC marathon on November 1.  Never thought I would contemplate running another marathon, but NYC is one that I have always wanted to do, so I went for it.  Did not get picked for the lottery, so I am running with team in training for leukemia, lymphoma, blood disease.  Make' this marathon even more  important to me.  I have a coworker who is a survivor and expecting his 3rd child in a month or two and my best friend's sister passed away from a form of leukemia a year or so ago.  For the first time , I am training with the Jeff Galloway walk/run method.  With the longer distances this is the only way I will make it to the end.  When I first started this method I felt like I was cheating with the walk breaks, but hey I will cover those 26.2 miles exactly like the winner of the marathon will....just a "tad" slower!! Like they say, "a mile is a mile, is a mile" My training has been going pretty well.  Had a 17 miler this past Sunday.  Did great until around mile 13, then I started to wear down.  It was hot, but that usually doesn't bother me.  My back was really hurting, I had to keep stopping to try and stretch it out or something, but nothing worked, so walked a lot the last 4 miles, but I did get it done.  The good news was that I had no cramping.  I have been having trouble with my calves cramping around mile 9, but I avoided that particular pleasure this time anyway.  I really think it is the walk breaks that are helping me with the cramping problem.  One of the aspects of Jeff Galloway marathon training is that it is a long program, that being said, I have 2 weeks now of low mileage , my next long run will be 20 miles, but the recovery weeks really help and he only has you run twice a week for at least 30 minutes.  This sounds like it would not be enough, but it really works!  I do some cross training, like weights and I go to the gym and do the bike for 1/2 an hour, but I am not as consistent at that as I should be.  I cannot do the 5-7 day a week running as I could in my younger years, just can't do it, so this is working great for me.

Ran the Cedar Point Run and Ride half marathon again in June, did okay, enough to place 2nd in age group (don't ask how many in age group, LOL)  hey, it's an accomplishment to be running at 65, right???  right????  Planning on running another half in September, not sure which one yet and the Columbus Oh. Half in October.

I am going to try and keep up with my blog for now on.  We'll see how that works out.  I try!!!

I will be posting a lot more about my NYC venture, but here is a link to my fundraising page!  We want to cure this disease in our lifetime.

http://pages.teamintraining.org/nj/nyc15/gbessm