May the wind stay at my back and may angels give me wings to fly.

I started avidly running in April of 2007, 8 weeks after my little boy was born. I was only running about 15 miles a week just to lose baby weight but a friend of mine was thinking of running the Honolulu Marathon. I made the bold move of doing it with her with the simple goal of just to finish. I finished my first marathon in 2008 with a time of 5:13. In 2009 I started running more miles, up to 40 a week when my schedule would allow that much. I signed up for my second Honolulu marathon and finished with a time of 4:48. That was with only 6 weeks of training, two of them being taper weeks. I finished with tears of joy and one other thing, the strong desire to run every runner's dream...BOSTON! I have some real good days and some real bad days but I hope someone finds inspiration in my spirit and strength. If you dig deep enough you will find the strength to do whatever your heart desires. "Don't follow your dreams...CHASE THEM!"

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

11 days, 8 hours, 33 minutes...

It's been a long while since I've made a post but it's also been a tough training season for me this fall. I was doing great in the summer in training to qualify for Boston this December and had even ran a 13 miler faster than I needed to with a 8:28 pace. However, as many of you know, life catches up with you sometimes and for me, it did. I had been running with plantar fasciitis over the summer without realizing what it was but once I was diagnosed I gave it a couple weeks to ease up. So that meant no running but I did cycle and do my strength training in the meantime. Then the mother of all pains hit me a week after I started running again, a lower back muscle spasm that was quite intense in pain level that left me on muscle relaxers for a couple weeks just so that I could function. I ended up not running for several weeks, basically all of September and October. I was fully healed by November 7th and I got to work immediately on running with only 5 weeks to get some long runs in. The PF still present might I add. I had to keep my mileage way down from what it was over the summer so I basically did a small run once during the week, cycled the other days, and did one long run on the weekend. My cardio has not had the time to get back up to par like it was in the summer but I can still run the distance, just not at the pace I wanted to. So this year, no BQ, but still a gift from God to allow me to run at all on December 12th. I refused to back out. It's the one race every year I look forward to running and that's the marathon. As a mother, wife, and college student, I don't have as many chances to run a lot of races like I would like to. So the marathon means a lot to me. Plus, it's my last one here in Hawaii so I'm rather nostalgic about the whole thing this time. I have had some crazy ups and downs but grateful to my coach, Mickey, and to God, my ups have always brought me up to the highest point of confidence in myself.

Boston will be mine one day, God just told me I have to wait a little longer and I accept that.

God's speed