Day 2

Pretty easy day. It is a rest or cross-train day so I did a video workout. Jillian Michael's 30 day shred. And that's about it. Tomorrow is a piece of cake 3 mile run day and I forget what else is in the running week but I see the forecast is promising rain starting on Wednesday. Good thing I did a super sloppy race a few months back when I really started thinking about the NY Marathon. It had been pouring rain and I signed up for a 17k race in the Marin Headlands. It was the sloppiest, muddiest run I had ever done. And at first, I thought it was kind of fun because it was so ridiculously sloppy. But when I was about halfway done I started to think that it was about 51% misery and 49% badass. And not long after that, the misery percentage went way way up so that by the end, it was somewhere around 99% misery. Compared to that, the upcoming week should be a piece of cake.

Day 1

This is it. My first official day of training for smaller things which will lead up to the New York Marathon. I ran the NY Marathon in 2005 but I am about 10 pounds heavier and nowhere near as strong of a runner as I was back then. But I have plenty of time to change all of that and it all started today with my first official training run. I have a few smaller races lined up through the year to make sure I'm actually running this year. I have a 5k this coming weekend, an 8k in the hills the following weekend, Bay to Breakers in May, the San Francisco Half Marathon in July and then the big one in November. So it was out with the old (shoes) and in with the new ones.

Since this is a marathon year, I bought 3 brand new pairs of running shoes. I will train in two of the shoes by alternating them and then about a month before the marathon, I'll start to break the third pair in. I decided to run the marathon in the ones in the middle with the bright yellow swoosh. I decided those might make me run faster if I'm fading during the race and I look down to see the encouraging splash of color.

I did a 4 mile run today at China Camp. It felt like I was climbing more than descending but that's not really possible. I felt a little dizzy towards the end because I only had a spoonful of peanut butter before running and I ran about 3 hours after that spoon of peanut butter. Dumb. I am used to waking up and running before I even get hungry but by the time I ran at noon, I was really hungry. Lesson learned.

My time wasn't very good but that's mostly because of the climbing. And because I walked the really steep parts (and some of the not really steep parts). I prefer to do my training runs in the hills because when I finally run on a flat course, I'm usually faster than if I did all of my training in the flats.

That's it for now. I call this 6 legs because my dog Uli will be doing lots of running with me. Or so I had hoped. He has some sort of soft tissue damage on his dew claw at the moment so I won't be taking him running until the swelling goes down and we know he's feeling better. I'll introduce you to my training buddy next time.