Dear Friends and Family...

Dear Friends and Family,

On January 10, 2010, Adam and Beth will both run the 26.2 miles of the Disney Marathon, in support of The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's (LLS) Team In Training (TNT) program. Why are we doing this? Aside from a healthy dose of insanity, it's because of our desire to help LLS's mission: to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families.

Adam

July 22, 1992 started off as a normal day. I went to summer camp in the morning, and we took a field trip to see the Mets beat the Dodgers, 7 to 5. My mom picked me up. It started to get weird when she didn't make the turn to go to our house that she always made. That's when she told me we were going to the hospital. At the hospital, they told me the bad news - my sister, Stacey, had leukemia. The good news was, as an otherwise healthy 11 year old with acute lymphocytic leukemia, her prognosis was excellent. About two and a half years, a couple of trips to the ICU, a great vacation in Disney World, and more spinal taps than we can count later, Stacey's chemotherapy treatments ended, and she is now a completely healthy 29 year old. Stacey and our entire family owe a huge debt of gratitude to LLS, an organization that helped pave the way in a number of tests and treatments utilized by her amazing team of doctors in the pediatric oncology unit at North Shore University Hospital.

Beth

Everyone knows someone who has been affected or who has lost a loved one to cancer. To me, it hit very close to home. When I was six years old, my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was a long battle for her, and when I was 9 and my mother was 42 she finally succumbed to the disease. My mother was a strong lady and when she was diagnosed the doctors told her she had six months to live. She battled for three years for the sake of seeing her children grow up just a little longer. The fight and determination my mother had has stayed with me. She fought hard, and every day as I train for this marathon, no matter how hard the training gets, I think of how hard my mother fought and of all the other people who have both succumbed to cancer and fought to overcome the disease. Although nothing can change the past, LLS can change lives in the future.

Thank you!

26.2 miles will not be easy - for either one of us. But 26.2 miles through the parks of Disney World one Sunday morning is nothing compared to what cancer patients and their families have to go through every single day. For them, the finish line is not some line at Epcot Center. It's a cure. With your help, we can make that happen.

Donations are 100% tax-deductible, and more than 74 cents of every dollar you donate will go directly to funding LLS's mission. Please donate by visiting:

http://pages.teamintraining.org/il/wdw10/TeamJewsforJogging

Don't forget to track our progress on our blog:

http://JewsForJogging.blogspot.com

Thank you, and we'll see you at the finish line!

It begins!

Fundraising starts today, and official training kick-off (for the NYC chapter) starts on September 12! Here we go...

199.5!

I haven't posted in a while, but today deserved an entry. After work, I went out for a 15 mile bicycle ride, around Lake Success, into Little Neck, up into Kings Point, and back south towards my house. Then, I stepped on a scale.

I just weighed in at 199.5 lbs.

At the beginning of the year I clocked in at about 225. I never had a goal weight, and I still don't. My only real goal is to run two marathons in a year, and I just kind of figured the weight would come off while I did that. Still, it was great to pass a milestone like 200. As far as I can remember, it's the first time I've been under 200 lbs since not long after I ran the Virginia Beach Half Marathon in September, 2004.

In other news...Beth registered with Team In Training this past weekend, and they're e-mailing me a registration form early next week, so mileage and fundraising are going to start to build up quickly very soon.

Hiatus over

Granted, I haven't posted in a few weeks, but to be fair, I haven't run in a few weeks either. No, I wasn't being lazy, it was actually intentional. It all started about three weeks ago...

I was signed up for a 4 mile race on Saturday, May 30. Then, I found out that Beth, who was going to be in town that weekend with her boyfriend, for his graduation and his cousin's bat mitzvah, was going to be free on Sunday, so I suggested that she bring her running shoes. I wasn't thrilled about running two days in a row, but hey, if we're training for a marathon together, it'd be nice to occasionally run together, right?

Of course, it wasn't until about Friday night that I found out that I was wrong about the race. It wasn't on Saturday. No, instead, it was Sunday morning, and as much as I didn't want to run twice in two days, I was even less excited about running twice in one day. Still, I wanted to run with Beth, and there aren't many qualifying races left during the year that I could reasonably do, so I decided to do both and just walk most of the race.

Sunday morning, I drove to near the start line by about 7:45, 15 minutes before the race. I did not factor in anywhere near enough time to find a parking spot. I figured it would be easy. I was wrong. After almost getting into a fight with one guy who was standing in a spot to save it for his friend still driving around (I actually got out of the car and got in his face before backing down because I realized the only thing I could do was drive my car into him, and that wasn't really a viable option), and circling for about half an hour, I finally found a spot almost half a mile from the start line, at 8:15. I ran to the start line, which was a great way to begin my plan of walking most of the race. The race was a loop, and they had already converted the start line into the finish line for timing purposes, so they told me I couldn't run across the start line, but that I could run the race and still get credit. I did, and probably walked about half of it. Still, because I couldn't run over the start time, my official personal time was calculated from the "gun time" (the actual start of the race) and not from when I crossed the start line, and that, in addition to the fact that I walked half the race, gave me an official time of 1:02:59, a 15:44 pace, which just barely missed setting a new world record for fastest time ever.

My IT band was not exactly perfect after that, but after Beth and I saw the Mets beat the Marlins at Citi Field, we went back to my place and went out for another 4 miles. This time we both ran the whole thing, at least until Beth mildly twisted her ankle turning into the final stretch. It looked a little swollen, and she reminds me of a horse, so I put her down. It was best for everybody.

Then my leg went to hell. I mean, it really sucked. I couldn't walk up stairs. Later that night, in response to my status message on facebook ("IT band syndrome...it's not just for the left leg anymore!"), my friend Andrea, who runs a LOT more than I do, told me she had suffered the same problem, and that I should take 2 or 3 weeks off from running, and in the meantime get a foam roller. I took the time off, just got the foam roller a few days ago, watched a video with some ditzy but, ultimately, persuasively attractive girls, started doing the part where they talk about working the IT band, and finally got back out today.

Today's run was 5K, just a little jog to get back into things. I finished in 30:50.44, a 9:55 pace. I'm planning to do two more of those during the week in tune up for a 5 mile race on Father's Day, which will be my sixth qualifier of the nine needed for the 2010 NYC marathon. Meanwhile, Beth's talking about never running again or something. What a wimp.

Another race and something new

Saturday I did a 10k in Central Park for my fourth qualifying race. This time, it was the Healthy Kidney 10k. According to my trusty Forerunner 205, it took me 1:01:27 to run 6.3 miles, a 9:45/mile pace. The official time was 1:01:29 over 6.2 miles, for 9:55 a mile. Either way, I've done 4 out of the 9 races I'll need in order to qualify for guaranteed entry to the 2010 NYC marathon.

I wasn't even going to go out tonight. I hadn't done anything between the 4 mile race on Sunday and the 10k on Saturday, that stupid IT band thing was hurting, and it was already dark out and my gym was going to close too soon. But, Beth was going to go for a run, and far be it from me to let her beat me, so off I went.

I got dressed to go out in warm clothes, and I was about to go out, when I realized I was dressed from neck to ankle in black at 10:15 pm. Considering how stupid I think pedestrians are when I'm driving and they're dressed all in black at night, I figured I'd better do something about that. It turns out I don't own anything reflective, and there's no way to attach my bicycle lights to my shirt. So I got the yellowest shirt I owned, threw it on top of the black, and headed out. There are plenty of benefits to dressing safely, chiefly not getting hit by a car, but looking good is not one of them.

I did two new things tonight. First, I did the same 2.5 mile loop around Russell Gardens that I've done plenty of times before, but I've always done it clockwise, so I reversed it. It's pretty remarkable how much a route can change just by switching directions. Suddenly you notice inclines that were too slight to feel like downhills when you had done it the other way. I'm pretty sure the uphills were tougher counterclockwise, so between that and and other new thing I did, I modified the loop the second time a keep a little of it a little more flat, but I still kept the biggest hills.

The second new thing I did was that I added sprint intervals. In addition to the last .2 miles, I had 3 quarter mile sprints and one 1/8 mile sprint (only because that section was flat for less distance than I expected). For those I did about 8 min miles, and the rest of the time I did about 9:50 miles, ending up with an average pace of 9:28 over 5 miles. It was definitely not the longest run I've done, but with the inclines and the sprints, it was one of the more challenging runs I've done.

1/3 of the way to guaranteeing entry

After being sidelined from running with what my cousin diagnosed as IT Band Syndrome for about a week and a half, I was finally completely pain-free on Thursday and Friday, and with a race in Central Park scheduled for Sunday, I went out for a jog on Friday evening when I got back from work. My sister was in town and wanted to join, so she and I headed out for a 5k loop around Russell Gardens and part of Great Neck Estates.

About halfway through, my sister had to stop to walk (she has a bad back), but she told me to keep going, so I did. The rest of the run felt like it was entirely uphill. It was just like having a conversation with Beth. Still, I did it, in under 30 minutes, and with not that much pain in my leg after.

The next day, my cousin told me it would be alright for me to take some of my brother-in-law's mobic, a prescription anti-inflammatory, to keep my leg from getting bad again, and it turns out, mobic is my new best friend. That stuff works great. I took it before the 4 mile race on Sunday, and never felt any pain, other than some soreness for a couple of days after.

This week, I have a 10k in the park on Saturday morning, and I'm hoping that I'll have time to get 4-5 miles in tomorrow night to stay loose for it, since I've done nothing since the race on Sunday. This stupid class that I'm taking to stay licensed as an attorney in New Jersey has taken up basically all of my free time, though, and I need to finish homework for that before I can go out to run.

Oh, the pain...

So, that little new pain I mentioned at the end of my last post? The one that started creeping in while I was walking home to cool down? Yeah...that turned into what has now been almost a week of pain. It forced me into a pretty ugly limp, especially going up stairs. Luckily, after being at a consistent level of hurting until Saturday, I woke up Sunday much improved, and I think I'm up to about 80%. Still, since I'm ridiculously busy for the next three nights, I'm going to keep resting the leg until Friday, when I'll head out and see if I can do a 5k, in preparation for the 4 mile race I'm doing on Sunday (Mother's Day). Should be fun.

I know what you're thinking..."Where's Beth been? She's the funny one." First of all, you're wrong. She's not funny. Second, she's just a lazy slacker. No big deal. She's just not as good a person as I am.