Week 10 & 11

We sure are working our way up with the running!  Week 10 had us running for an hour and 40 minutes.  Unfortunately, that was probably my worst performance ever.  The Friday evening before, I had a personal training session at the gym, but didn't eat any dinner.  I went to sleep late, and then worried that I'd sleep through my alarm, so I kept waking up throughout the night.  That 7:30AM run came EARLY.  I was sluggish and definitely had no gas in my tank.  Thus, I didn't think it merited its own blog update.

This past Saturday we met up at the Tidal Basin in DC and worked our way around the National Mall.  Twice.  And a run around the Tidal Basin to finish it off.  My iPod was acting up, so the Nike+ didn't record my run.  That was annoying.  But when I mapped it out, it looked like I ran between 9 and 10 miles.  CRAZY!  I've never run that far in my life.  Another teammate and I were reminiscing about our first running session (which was also at the Tidal Basin) and how hard it was to run for half an hour.  We really HAVE come a long way.  I've been discouraged at times along the way, but when I think back to that first day of running, I can definitely see improvement, and that is something that I can be proud of.

We were able to try on our official CCFA Team Challenge race singlets (tanktops) on Saturday.  This gets me excited to keep going and training to hopefully finish the race in a decent time!  The only thing I'm worried about is injury.  My ankle seems to be holding up pretty well, but with these long runs, my feet get covered in blisters.  Here's what my feet looked like after the run on Sat:

Pretty dang gross!  And painful.  Now, feet are generally ugly anyway.  But add blisters to them and EW!  I even had a pedicure last week!  Amazing what running can do in just one week to ruin perfectly groomed feet.

Anyway.  I digress.  This past weekend also meant the end of my personal fundraising deadline.  I am SO proud of the progress made!  THANK YOU to all that have helped me to reach my goal.  I'm not quite there yet, but I think 92% to goal is still something to celebrate!  We officially still have until November 18th to meet our goals before we get to make up the difference ourselves.  I'm confident that this can be done!  I'm planning on participating in a group fundraiser event that will hopefully help out.  As a team, we have raised over $100,000!!  This is AWESOME!

I will close out this post with the Saturday's Mission Moment:

This week’s Mission Moment was presented by fundraising mentor, Mandy Sturmfelz. Mandy was on the Kona team this past summer and raised over $5,500 for CCFA. She decided to come back to mentor this season to help however she could! She will be joining us in Vegas and will be on the course. Mandy has Crohn’s disease and is an extremely friendly and positive person.  Here is an excerpt from her website… I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease during college and I’ve been riding the roller coaster of Crohn’s for the past 13+ years. Although I’ve been very fortunate to have good doctors, medical insurance and a great support network of friends and family, I nonetheless HATE Crohn’s Disease and hope that a cure will be found so others will not have to experience the same ordeals and complications I have experienced….


GO TEAM DC!