I'm in!!

Oh what a relief it is to finally know if I won the lottery or not! But I'm very pleased to say that I'm in! It has made the disappointment of backing out of the bike race a little easier.

I have so many ideas on how to train these next 5 months. I'm so glad that I finally listened to my body and took time off from running! I'm feeling so good. Especially mentally. I'm going in to training with a different mindset this go around. Instead of focusing on a finish time, even though I do have one, I am focusing on daily, weekly, and monthly progress. I'm not going to stress over race day, I am going to keep focused on each week and making sure to hit all my scheduled workouts and runs.

This training I'm keeping up with weight lifting. I've always felt I needed to become stronger. I've always stopped in past trainings. I'm also going to test out other ideas. In the past, I've always set paces for each run and that has only led to stress and burnout. While I do plan to do track workouts once a week and then a tempo run, the other days I plan to either be a recovery run or a trail run. I am planning to run my long runs on the trails. I feel this will only make me stronger. The roads around me are flat, which makes training for an aggressive downhill race very hard. Besides trails having hills, it also its a very special place for me. I grew up hiking with my dad and have very fond memories, and every time I am on the trails, it brings back that peace and joy.

Not only do I plan to run my long runs on the trails, I also plan to run longer than marathon distance in training. I have wanted to do this in past training but never did. (And of course I have picked the toughest training months to accomplish this!) I am excited about this goal. I think mentally it'll make me stronger and able to push harder come race day.

I'm really excited for training to begin. Today was day 1 and started it off with bootcamp! Tomorrow I plan to run 4 miles, followed by weight training. Time to kick it into high gear! I'm totally stoked about getting into this race again! This marathon was my very first marathon and this will be the 3rd time running it (9th total marathon) I've gone through a lot these past few years but I feel this is my time now. If I can stick to my training plan, I can accomplish what I set out to do!