Half-Marathon

January check in!

At the beginning of January I blogged my 2012 goals/resolutions. Now that January is over, I want to look back and see how I am doing and if I accomplished anything!

Life goals/resolutions

  1. Get a job and work my butt off. This didn’t happen, but I’m working on it for the end of February!
  2. Travel to Savannah, GA. I’m hoping to do this in June!
  3. Read 50 books. I have read four so far!
  4. Be more generous/surprise others more. I did great with this because I made my parents a 25th wedding anniversary photo book. They were very surprised and it made me feel good.

Spiritual goals/resolutions

  1. Continue to have Bible studies with Jimmy and get through 5 more books of the Bible. We’re trucking along in Romans right now with weekly Bible studies/coffee dates
  2. Journal 3x a week. I’m doing super good with this goal. For me, once I start to journal daily it becomes a habit than I cherish.

Health and fitness goals/resolutions

  1. Run outside at least 2x a week in the cool months. Ha… I’m stuck at running in the cold 1x a week right now. Oh well!
  2. Run my 3rd half marathon and an ultra or a full marathon. I signed up for my 3rd half and I’m training for a full marathon in June. Fingers crossed I don’t get injured!
  3. Break 21:00 and/or 20:00 in the 5k. I have a few 5k’s that I have my eye on to run in April/May.
  4. Learn to “back off” when I feel a possible injury coming on. I’m doing pretty good with this. The week before I started training for the marathon my knee felt weird so I didn’t run for most of that week. Injury avoided. So far :p.

So that is how I’m doing with my goals/resolutions in the new year! I’m astonished at how fast January went by. Now it is already February 4th…crazy.

This month I’m going to be doing lots of school work (as usual when I’m in school!), working on becoming employed, running (and possibly training for a master’s swim meet!!!), maybe go skiing, go to another college game night party, and hang out with friends/family/Jimmy. Fun stuff!

The weather in Pittsburgh has been wonderful lately (in the mid to high 40’s!) and I just feel really blessed and content with life in general<3

I hope you have a great February!

Running plans

Well hello hello and welcome to WEDNESDAY! —-> I just typed that and it sounded so overly perky and annoying that I decided to keep it as my intro haha. Sorry 😉 [I do talk like that in real life occasionally-eek]

I feel as if I haven’t talked much about running on my blog lately and I guess it was for a reason. I didn’t really have any plans for completing a race. I have still been running (20-35 mile weeks) and I’ve been trying to work out a racing schedule. Yeah, it’s been fun. I was looking into running a 20 mile race in February, an 30k in March, various 5k’s/10k’s in April and a marathon in June. 

Mostly, I want to run a marathon, so that is what i’m going to focus on! DUH. If I follow a 18 week training plan, that mean’s i’ll start training for the June 2nd marathon in the last week of January. I want to follow the training plan as closely as possible and some of the winter races i’m looking into just don’t match up with the plan/milage. You win some, you lose some (literally…).

The toughest part about running in January-June is the crazy Pittsburgh winter/spring weather for long runs!

So it looks like I am going to be running a half in March (like I did last year.)I’ll also be running a lot of 5k’s/10k’s in April and a marathon in June. That is the plan, if I don’t get injured!

As my road racing season gets closer I will be posting a more exact schedule of all the races i’ll be doing. For now I will leave you with my 2011 year end report from Daily Mile. 

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How do you deal with the inclement weather for long runs?!