Marathon Training

So for about the past 5 weeks, my friend Lacey and I have been training for a marathon. We started out just wanting to do the half, but now we officially just registered for the FULL San Francisco Marathon!

The coolest thing about this race is that you get to run across the Golden Gate Bridge...twice! I think it will be so wonderful to go to a lower elevation and have such beautiful scenery all around. They are also going to have bands stationed along the way and trivia questions.

Our goal is to cross the finish line as an "official finisher" because we will get a medal! This means that we have to run an average of 13:45 per mile, but we think we can do it in about 10 min/mile.

It's been really great training with Lacey because she motivates me to keep running and knowing that she is sticking to our schedule, helps me to stay on track too. We run three times during the week, have a cross train day, two rest days and then do a long run on Saturdays. So far our longest run was 7 miles. It wasn't as bas as I thought, although I did have to do "positive thought overload" for the last 3 miles. It helped so much to just focus on the positive and compliment myself.

For one of my week-day runs, I ran with my friend Lauren and we decided to trade in our iPods for cameras! (I didn't bring my headphones, but I still brought my iPod so we could tell how far we ran). It was fun and even though it was a really hard trail, because it was straight up a mountain, we really enjoyed it. (and the mountain pictured below is actually A LOT steeper when you run up it!)

So I will be running A LOT from now til July 25th... but this is something I have always wanted to do. I decided that I may not have this much spare time in the future with a job, family, etc. so I want to accomplish this while I can! This Saturday is our first race training (a 5K) and then June 18-19 we are running the Wasatch Back Ragnar Relay! We are really excited for this too because it's a team of 12 girls who run 3 times each, adding up to 188 miles! It's going to be quite the adventure...and good marathon training too :)

I love exercise and accomplishing goals! (and I've never been to San Francisco, so I will accomplish 2 life goals in one trip...perfect.)