Ready, Set, Go

As anyone who has ever spent months upons months preparing for one big day, a few miniscule moments of life, knows, when the countdown can be kept in hours, rather than days, mixed feelings abound.

From food choices to my social calendar, for the last five months everything has been organized around a training regime. It started out as a chore. A chore whose results I desired, but whose tasks I did not enjoy nor really mind. It was simply a part of my life to be tolerated, much like brushing my teeth. But over time, toleration turned into adoration.

The logical assumption is that running thirty plus miles a week has flooded my body with so many endorphins that it was just a hangover from the "runner's high." Perhaps that is part of the answer, but the real cause of this love affair with running is this blog. Finally putting pen to paper (ehh, fingers to computer) and expressing all the crazy thoughts that come to me when running, turned out to be the x-factor in this marathon training plan. Just as much as I have enjoyed conquering each mile, I have loved sharing my experience.

But all good things must come to an end, and the marathon is right around the corner. After the marathon, I will post once more to recap the marathon and then I will plan on signing off until next marathon training season. But before I head out to Philadelphia for the experience of a lifetime, I wanted to share (once more) my favorite blog posts and the story of my blogging/running experience. Read through them once more and then lace up your shoes, and do something that you always wanted to do but never thought you could do.

Here's my first real blog post: Waking Up and Working Out. It's by no means the best one, but it's my first and thus that makes it special.

I had written Central Park Jogger long before I actually typed it out. Central Park brings so many runners together and those runners put all of my excuses out of business. If they can do it, so can I.

Mid-summer I changed jobs, and this inspired a story about quitting a run. Quitters is one of the first times I tried to draw a parallel between life and running. It's right around this post that I finally found my blogging voice and started to love the blogging as much as the running.

Is it hot in here or what? represents my second foray into drawing a parallel between life and running. This time I tried to show how running through the second hottest summer in New York helped me reconnect with my sixteen year old self. Corny? Maybe, but then again the heat makes me do crazy things.

By the end of September, my love affair with marathon training was in full swing and this post was my attempt at trying to get others to drink the Kool-aid. For the love of the run might be my favorite.

October brought some pre-marathon anxiety and worry, but these were quickly resolved when I volunteered to help at NYRR's Grete's Great Gallop Half Marathon and then I shared my story in Plus One, Minus One Wall.

And now, I'm off to Philadelphia to run twenty-six point two miles.