Ragnar Relay

The Ragnar Relay: Florida Keys is a 198.5 mile, 36-leg relay race of 12-member teams that starts in Miami and ends in the southernmost part of the country, Key West. I'm so excited to be running it for the first time! I've wanted to do this since, we'll pretty much since I heard that people did this sort of thing.

A couple of months ago my co-worker, who is participating in the race, asked if I would be interested in joining his team because they had a couple dropouts and needed to fill in some empty spots on the team. I, of course, accepted. Now the race is one week away, and I'm beyond excited. As of right now, I'm running in 9th position, with a 4.2 mile 1st leg, 8.1 mile 2nd leg and a 2.7 mile 3rd leg. We start on Jan. 6th sometime in the middle of the night (can't remember the exact start time) so my first leg won't be until daylight sometime. But anyway, we'll finish sometime on Jan. 7th, probably sometime after noon, and yes, we'll be running through the night.

I'm sure I'll have tons of stories to tell when I get back, and hopefully (if I can keep my phone charged) I'll be able to post a little about it on Facebook/Twitter in real time.

Muddy Buddy

It's been a long time since I've said anything on here, hadn't really done anything exciting, until November...I did Muddy Buddy Miami with my sister!!

November 20th, 2011 to be exact. We had a great time (as one should if they're doing Muddy Buddy) and got really, really dirty. Of course.

Here's a couple "before and after" pictures...

Gate River Run

Well, I didn't do the half marathon that I wanted to do in February. It was a rough month...I got food poisoning at the beginning of the month, which took me several days to fully recover from, then the family dog I grew up with passed away suddenly the following week, and things just snowballed from there. But, I did commit to a new challenge last month, the Gate River Run! It's written up as the biggest 15K in the United States, and has 17,000 participants this year. It's no half marathon, but it is about 9.3 miles. This is no piece of cake though...it's got some serious uphill with two bridges along the course, with the very, very long one in the 8th mile (so cruel).
I ran about 6.5 miles this past weekend, and though I did bite the dust during the run(for the first time ever while running!) I didn't do too bad, even threw in a couple bridges for fun. The race is next weekend, should be tons of fun! I'll let you know how I did, and maybe even post some pictures if I can snag some.

Holidays, procrastination and preparation

Well, the holidays got to me after all...I ate terrible (but delicious) food, and got incredibly lazy. The only time I ran was on Christmas Day, and it was not good. I've hit the road only a couple times since then...with going to Chicago over New Years and then starting a new contract this week, there just wasn't time. Well, more like I didn't make time, with everything else going on.

My original goal was to run in the same half marathon in February in Gainesville that I did last year. But now that race is less than 6 weeks away and I haven't run more than 4 miles in a very long time. Not sure that I can still do that race, but I'm going to do a few practice runs and see how it goes. If I feel like I can do it, I might give it a shot. I don't know, part of me wonders if less preparation doesn't somehow give me an advantage...I mean, I've approached everything else in my life with procrastination and waiting until the last minute, and it's worked out pretty well so far. We'll see...In any case, I did a short run today to get warmed up, 2.25 miles, and I did really well! Averaged less than 8 minutes a mile, I don't know if I've ever pushed myself at that pace, probably because I'm always focused on distance and endurance over speed. I'm pretty proud of myself...

I'm excited because I've got this new app on my phone that tracks my distance, pace, time, etc. If only I could get it to work right...might be user error though, if you know what I mean. I checked my progress after the first mile and found that the only thing the program was tracking was my time, I guess I had forgotten to turn on the GPS. Had to go to mapmyrun.com to find out the exact distance, in order to calculate my pace. I'll test the program out again this week, on my next run.