Awesome, Awesome, Awesome!!

I feel awesome today... FINALLY mentally prepared to jump into marathon training with 110% GUSTO! I have decided I will continue to watch the Terry Tate Pain Train video for motivation as I try to imagine him tackling me if I do not go out for my scheduled marathon training runs :)

I met one of my co-workers and fellow Chicago Marathon training pals Laurie out on the Greenway trails for a 6 mile run this morning. It was a great morning although we did not actually get out on the trail til almost 9:00 AM and the temp was already at 80 degrees. I know I will definitely have to start running earlier and earlier as the weather gets hotter down herrrre in da South! Laurie has done 4 or 5 marathons in the past and mentioned that the group of us training for Chicago might actually have to resort to the treadmill when the real dog days of summer hit. Of course, I avoid the treadmill like the plague but I could see some merit in that. Luckily, we have a full gym at our office with a whole row of treadmills so a bunch of us could train at once.... turn on the satellite TVs... and even bring our own CD mix to blast through the radio system in the gym. Laurie also mentioned bringing a cooler to sit in front of the treadmills and we could turn the fans on full blast. I told her that we will see... ha ha. Although... it does kinda sound like fun and we would probably have the entire gym to ourselves as most of my coworkers probably do not even know we have a gym, much less know where it actually is (the first floor, people!)

So... I am feeling great. My left Achilles which has been bothering me since my St. Patty's Day 10K is feeling great. I now feel prepared physically and mentally to start my journey.

A lot of people ask me how I plan to train for a marathon when I am traveling all over the place 85-90% of the time. This is a fabulous question. When I look at my calendar for the next 3 months, I am traveling nearly every week and sometimes hitting several different cities in one week- often on different coasts and international travel. I have looked at my training plan and have tried to proactively work out the weeks where I will not be able to do my normal Saturday long run here in Charleston and have tried to work around that first. I also have used Gmap and www.favoriterun.com to look up good running routes on the road.

Screw excuses!