Congrats San Diego!

Wow, I can't believe it's already June! Only 3 weeks til my race in Seattle...yikes! Lots of exciting news and updates though. First I want to give a shout out and huge CONGRATULATIONS to all my teammates who finished the San Diego Rock 'n' Roll Marathon last weekend! Their pictures and stories are all incredibly inspiring - I sort of wish I had picked that race now! Tuesday night a bunch of them came to track hobbling to show off their medals and share their stories. The biggest advice I got was to run with someone and to rely on TNT runners and staff for motivation because they are there to support you and get you to that finish line. After seeing and hearing my teammates I'm now more than ever excited for my race. For the first time I feel like, although it will undoubtedly be challenging, I'll totally be able to finish my race. Here are some great pics from the SD marathon, courtesy of Tom Wells and Peter Crawford : )

The infamous "running Elvises" of the SD Rock 'n' Roll Marathon!

Such a great face!

Ready to cross that finish line!

Backtracking a bit, last Tuesday was the last track practice for San Diego. Coach Neal had us do Swedish relays again - 4 800m (2 laps). Although they are a bit harder, I actually kind of like speed workouts because they're such a change of pace (literally) from my usual running. At the end of practice we took a team pic and wished all the San Diego runners luck!

Swedish relays!Single file!!I'm going to miss these guys!

Last Saturday May 30th was our final taper training before our 20 miler. Our team is so much smaller now that San Diego is gone, and it felt a little lonely on the course : ( We started out at Goleta Beach and headed out along the Obern Trail. The first exciting surprise was NO KNEE PAIN!! I iced like crazy the week before and took Ibuprofen regularly and it worked! I ran with Tom for the first and last part of the run, which always makes for good, distracting conversation. Although the route is nice and flat, it's also pretty straight and at times can be a little mentally challenging. We got in 8 miles though and then relaxed the rest of the day!

Sarah and I switched our cross-training from Sunday to Monday and decided to hit the gym for the first time in a long time for both of us. It was kind of fun trying to figure out all the different machines and it felt good to be doing something other than cardio. I only wish I had started earlier in the season! Not surprisingly, however, I'm still sore.

This past Tuesday at track we did another timed 5k like earlier in the season. This brings me to a funny story : ) I was feeling pretty fresh and inspired by the San Diego finishers so I just started out booking it! Tom caught up with me and helped me maintain that speed, but he hadn't been here for the first one so we were relying on my memory to know when the turnaround point was. I remembered from last time that it was a big rock on the left past the pier...so when we passed the pier and saw a big rock, we turned around. Well at that point we were at about 8 minutes...which seemed faster than it should've. We didn't think much of it though and started our run back, passing our other teammates who seemed quite surprised to see us heading back already. When we finished we saw that our time was 18:08. Although this made no sense considering our pace and my previous time of 27 minutes (no way could I have knocked off 9 minutes), we didn't think about it much, until some of our teammates finished a bit later and informed us that we had turned at the wrong rock! So we had basically cut off .6 of a mile, but I rationalize this mistake by focusing on our pace, which was between 7:30 and 8 minutes per mile, which still would've cut 3 minutes off my time and is a huge improvement! I totally should've known that my memory was unreliable.

BIG NEWS in fundraising! I recently reached $3,400!! This means I'm 87% of the way to my goal of $3,900. Special thanks for helping me reach this point go to:

Danny & Sally Michael
Brian & Kathleen Pfanner
Gabi Kuftinec
Phil Pantages

I also received another anonymous donation...for $400!! So thank you to this special person, too ; ) With a few more donations coming in and the money I'm getting from volunteering at Nite Moves, I should get pretty close to my goal by final finds. Speaking of, my deadline for final funds is 9am on Friday June 12th, which means all donations must be in by this time!!! Of course donations will still be accepted after this date and posted to my website until mid-July, but I would really love to get as close as possible by final funds! Please visit my fundraising website (see the link on the right) and consider making a donation - every little bit helps and goes toward a really amazing cause!

This Saturday is our last long training, the big 20 miler!! Basically if you can do 20, you can do the 26.2 miles in a marathon. After 6 months of training, this marks the peak of my running before race day so I'm pretty excited to get this under my feet because then I'll finally be ready for the marathon! Wish me luck, I'll let you know how it goes!