Thursday, January 8, 2015

#writeandrun31

Well I joined a group on Facebook, #writeandrun31, that my friend Becky invited me into. The goal/point of this is to write and run for 31 days straight. The running part should be easy as I am in the middle of a running streak (22 days and 69.5 miles so far) but the writing part may prove a little more difficult. But its a good push for me to write for my blogs (the other one is http://musingsofawomanscientist.blogspot.com/ where I post my scientific writing) and to write for my social running group, which I am woefully behind on.

So I was supposed to post daily goals for each of these tasks and I haven't done that yet. The minimal running goal is easy - at least 1 mile. Right now that is proving a little tougher as we are in the middle of a cold snap and motivating myself to run outside when the windchill is 3 F is tough. But I have other running goals during the year. Again, I have a goal of running 1200 miles. I fell short of that in 2014 and didn't make it even to 1000 miles, but I got pretty close at 985.4 miles. I also need to work on my speed. On Christmas, while talking with my brother-in-law Joe, a family challenge was proposed. Of course this challenge wasn't going to include the whole family (Joe run??!?) but just myself and my youngest sister, Sarah, as we are the only ones who run in the family. As both of us have run marathons the challenge is to see who can run the Naperville (IL) marathon the fastest. Thankfully, Sarah has agreed to base the results of this challenge on age-graded results as she is 15 years younger than me. Training for the distance of a marathon won't be difficult as I've been running ultra-marathons for a couple of years but I've gotten older and slower and I really would like to beat her outright! My fastest marathon was my first - 4 hrs 20 min at Marine Corp Marathon in 1996. My slowest was 5 hr 24 min at the D&L Heritage Marathon in 2011. There are other races and goals that I am mulling but I'll save that for another post!

I don't have a set writing goal yet - just to write something every day. I'm almost tempted to count this as part of tomorrow's goal as I've already updated my other blog today. But instead, I'm writing this now as a means of procrastinating. I don't feel like reading and grading a student paper!