Pre-season

Thanks to everyone who has donated so far! We've reached 10% of our fundraising total! Donate today at:

http://bit.ly/jewsforjogging

I don't know about Beth, but I'm planning on posting every week after the TNT group runs on Saturday mornings. Unfortunately, the NYC chapter's winter season hasn't officially kicked off yet - the first winter season group run isn't until September 12. Still, they did give us a 4 week "pre-season" schedule to use (which I started following yesterday, the second to last day of week 2), and I figure in addition to memorializing the start of following the TNT training schedule, I should also get in the habit of writing a post weekly.

Seems like just yesterday Beth was telling me that she was thinking about running Disney and I, indecisive about how I was going to eventually gain entry to a New York marathon, realized that it would be a great incentive to do the 9 qualifying races, that I could raise money with TNT while doing it, and that Beth and I could motivate mock each other to keep going. It was actually back in December, about 8 months ago. Time really flies.

I'm calling myself an "intermediate" runner (in your face, every gym coach I ever had), so yesterday's pre-season was 40 to 50 minutes of easy running, which I accomplished with 5 miles on easy hills at a 9:14 pace. Probably a little faster than I should have gone, but oh well. Today's was 30 to 40 minutes, so I did the same types of hills over 4 miles at a 9:04 pace.

They also have pre-season group runs on Wednesday nights for a few weeks before the official season kickoff, but I couldn't make last week's. I'm planning on going to this week's. It will be my first ever organized group run. I'll have to show off my mad skillz.

Oh, also, I should probably mention that last Saturday, I successfully slept through the Harlem 5K, which would have been my 7th qualifying race for NYC. Today I'm signing up for the Continental 5th Avenue Mile. I'm going to hold off on signing up for anything else until I see the TNT training schedule. Hopefully I can schedule the qualifying races around the same time I would be doing the same distance with TNT.

One last thing - I started a training log on Google Documents. Admittedly, the push-ups and crunches were pretty awful, but hey, I haven't done either in almost a year, the running is what matters most, and pre-season doesn't count. Anyway, according to Google, all you need is this link to view:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjYT-XBo5UH9dE9SVWRLcFhEd3YzTG83S0EzYzlsVkE&hl=en

See you next week.