First Donations!

Happy New Year's Eve! This past weekend, I received my first donations from my brother Dave (who is in the Bahamas now... I'm very jealous), my wonderful husband Nick and my favorite mother-in-law Linda! THANK YOU!

Buffalo was a lot of fun. On Friday we got to hang out with with Nick's nephews and went to dinner with his family at Chef's. I haven't had a bad meal in Buffalo, and Chef's was no exception. I recommend the house specialty: spaghetti parm. Unbelievable. On Saturday, Nick and I went with his friend Jim to Holiday Valley to go skiing. There wasn't a lot of snow, but we managed to get a lot of runs in and had fun. Saturday night we had another fantastic meal at Curly's. The black bean soup and cioppino were excellent! One thing I can say about visiting Buffalo, is that you won't go hungry!

I did bring my clothes to go for a run tonight at the gym, but seeing as it's NYE, the gym is closing at 5. Well, I guess that I am in for a longer run tomorrow then. I'll post my training schedule soon. Have a safe and enjoyable New Year's Eve!

Chafe: Chap's ugly cousin

beef on weck

So last night I ran 7 miles on the treadmill. I did the first 3.5 at 7.0 mph and 1.0 incline and then wanted to do the next 3.5 miles at 6.8 mph and 1.5 incline. I got about a mile into that and had to bring the speed down a bit. I finished in 62:29, which is a little under 9:10 miles- which is what I should be running to finish in 4 hours. Lesson learned from this run is not to go too quickly in the beginning. That's always been my issue- pacing. I felt fine at the end though- I wasn't out of breath and my legs felt OK. Strangely enough, my forearms felt a little uncomfortable towards the end, but if I let them hang loose for a few seconds they felt better... Also, I was sweating like crazy. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and my right underarm got chafed enough to be stinging at the end. (Note: Running has a lot of mildly gross to disgusting side effects that non-runners wouldn't expect. I hope this adds an element of intrigue to my otherwise boring entries.)

We're heading to Buffalo this evening to celebrate Christmas with Nick's family. The image at the beginning of this entry is a sandwich that I had never heard of before going to Buffalo, but is considered to be one of the city's signature dishes: beef on weck.

Christmas

Christmas was fun. We went to CT for Christmas Eve and day, but came back last night because I had to work today. Tomorrow evening we're leaving for Buffalo to see Nick's family for Christmas and we'll be back on Sunday evening. I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any workouts in while we're in Buffalo, so I'm going to go to the gym tonight and am aiming for a 7 mile run, which is 2x what I'll run in a normal workout. I still have to read most of the book, but I think we'll have some down time in Buffalo and hope to finish it this weekend. I told my family that I'm training for the marathon and they were surprised, but supportive. Fortunately, I got some great cold weather running gear for Christmas and now I have no excuse to get out of longer weekend runs.

I haven't technically started training yet...

but I bought a book. 4 hours seems pretty ambitious, but seeing as I can do the half marathon in a little over 2 hours without really training for it, I'm willing to give this author's training schedules a shot. His writing style is very direct and I like having a step-by-step training schedule spelled out for me. The tough part will be following it. Posting my work outs on the blog will help keep me in check though. For example, I feel a little guilty that I didn't run this weekend, but I did ski for at least 6 hours each day, which is something at least.