Start time: 6/7/03, 7:00am
Location: W&OD Trail
Activity: Running
Distance: 8 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 14:00min/mile

Well, with week four, it’s hard to believe it’s been a month since Julie and I took the plunge again. It’s also hard to believe it’s almost summer with all this rain we’ve been getting in DC. Argh! One big ray of sunshine, though, came in the form of donations from my parents, Felicity Kusinitz, and Trina Short. Thank you all so much!

This weather is more than just annoying, I might add—it makes running really dreary and distinctly not fun. I ended up skipping one of my weekday runs entirely, doing the second one on Thursday when the sun decided to come out and taunt us. When the sun was still hanging around on Friday I thought that maybe… just maybe… nope. Saturday morning brought us rain, rain, and more rain.

I have to say that today’s training run was probably one of the five most miserable ones I’ve ever experienced. We’ve had some scorching hot runs (although I missed the infamous run of death last summer… oh darn) but this was a completely different kind of yuck. Despite having a baseball cap on my glasses were covered with water so I could barely see, my waterproof jacket had clearly overloaded and was clinging to me in a not at all pleasant way, and all I could think about was how wonderful it must be to wear dry clothing. I don’t know if it was the weather or just being tired, but I was dragging all through the second half to boot; nothing was hurting, just a general desire to find a nice warm bed and curl up for a little nap.

When we had about a quarter mile left to go, Julie started cracking up and pointed at the front of my legs. Apparently the rinse cycle of my laundry machine left trace amounts of soap in my shorts, and after almost two hours of pounding rain, they’d started to foam up and then drip the soap all down my legs. We decided that I was so eager to go home and take a shower that I’d already started to lather up. (Of course, then we noticed that Julie’s new shorts had dripped black ink down into her socks, so turnabout is fair play.)

Here’s hoping for a slightly dryer next Saturday!

Start time: 5/31/03, 7:00am

Location: W&OD Trail

Activity: Running

Distance: 7 miles

Run:Walk ratio: 3:1

Average pace: 14:00min/mile

Another week, another progress report… big thanks this week to my grandmother Ruth Spinelli, who became my latest donor while I was up visiting her in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Thanks so very much!

It’s amazing how a bad week can radically change someone’s attitude. If you’d asked me how I was feeling about this year’s training yesterday, the truth is that I wasn’t feeling terribly positive about it. After last Saturday’s run, sitting in a car for four hours was not one of the best things I could’ve done for my legs. By the time we arrived in Pennsylvania my calves were feeling stiff and sore, something they shouldn’t have been doing after just a six-miler. Even worse, I wasn’t able to shake the soreness; I went running on Monday evening after I got back home, and I had to quit halfway through because it felt like I hadn’t run in years.

All week long, I was trying to loosen up my legs and get back up to speed, with both crosstraining and just plain old walking. Add in strange shifting weather patterns and my joints were hurting on and off with no rhyme or reason. (Bizarrely, so were Julie’s, making us decide that it was the fault of the weather.) Even as late as Friday night, though, I wasn’t feeling good about it all. I was quietly thinking to myself that if this kept up, I’d have to seriously re-evaluate my decision to do the marathon this year.

So this morning when the alarm went off at 5am, I was not in the most pleasant of moods. I hauled myself to the run site, we split into two smaller groups, and headed out into the (thankfully not very hot) humidity… and a funny thing happened. Everything seemed to finally snap back into place. I didn’t have any problems at all with my legs or any body part. Maybe all I needed was a nice long run to finally get back to speed, but the seven-miler flew by really quickly, and our group (me, Julie, Asha, Lindsay, and Mary) did a great job of hitting all of our time goals.

Needless to say, I’ve made sure to keep everything moving today since then, and so far so good. Sometimes, it seems, all you have to do is not give up and it’ll all work out in the end.

Start time: 5/24/03, 8:00am
Location: W&OD Trail
Activity: Running
Distance: 6 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 14:00min/mile

Well, it’s only been a week and it’s still hard to believe I’m doing this again! Big thanks to my first donors for this year, Esther Friesner and Julie Babyak, both who sent donations in before I’d even gotten my butt in gear to start soliciting any! Wow!

I was feeling a little sore after last week’s run (a lethargic winter will do that to you) so I took it easy this week; the near-continual rain and gloom may have had something to do with that as well. Before I knew it, though, it was already Saturday morning and time to head back onto the running trail!

Our group was pretty large this early on in the game, so the staff asked us to at least temporarily split into two groups. Madelyn took one group, while I ended up taking the other. It felt like old times to have a nice small group again, although I suspect we won’t stay split for too long. People always drop out of the program, or shift to different pace groups early on. For now, though, this split should work pretty well.

Our last 8am start time until October (yikes) greeted us with cool temperatures and cloudy weather; it kept threatening to rain, but never actually did so. Probably because I brought a hat. Our group did pretty well with staying on pace, something that’s often tough to do this early on! It seems like a really nice group of people.

And now, I’m off to Western Pennsylvania to visit relatives over Memorial Day weekend. I hope everyone else enjoys the day off (if they get one)…

Start time: 5/17/03, 8:00am
Location: W&OD Trail
Activity: Running
Distance: 5 miles
Run:Walk ratio: 3:1
Average pace: 14:00min/mile

If you’d asked me all winter long, my running plans for this year were set in stone. Run the Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon in August, then train through that fall and winter to do the Mardi Gras Marathon at the end of February. (Not, thankfully, during Mardi Gras itself.) But with the coming of spring began longings… to run a full marathon in 2003… to be able to train for a marathon with shorts instead of sweatpants… and to tackle the Marine Corps Marathon one more time and see if the second time through I could do even better.

So in the end, after a lot of debate, my friend Julie and I signed up to do the AIDS Marathon summer program one more time. Right now we’re definitely going to still run the Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon in August, as well as the Marine Corps Marathon at the end of October. We may still do the Mardi Gras program afterwards, or another early 2004 race to take its place (a little voice on the West Coast keeps whispering “Long Beach Marathon” to me), but we’ll see.

We missed the first two weeks of this program, so we decided to jump right in with everyone else the third week. We’d run some smaller races this spring so we knew how our speed was looking, and since we had just done a 3-miler two weeks ago anyway, we figured we were ready for a 5-miler this Saturday. What was especially nice is that we had two people that’d we’d run with before in our group; Madelyn, who we’d run with in 2001 and 2002, is in the 14:00 group, and also there is John, who we ran with in 2001. It always makes such a big difference to have a familiar face or two waiting!

We had a much larger group this year—last year’s group only had six people (and on any given weekend someone was always missing!), but this week there were no less than twelve. I suspect our numbers will dwindle with time, but for now it was an interesting experience trying to keep so many people together. We unfortunately only had eight in the group by the time we finished; two runners were having some leg problems and turned around early, and John and someone else slowed down a little bit because the cold, yucky weather was playing havoc with John’s breathing.

By the time we were done running, though, it felt really good to be back up in the swing of things. I was feeling a little hesitant all week about this, but by the time we left I knew we’d made the right decision. It should be a fun six months!