Finally made it through the holidays!

We've finally made it through the holidays relatively unscathed.  The kids had a blast, and mom and dad had a great time soaking it in and enjoying it.   Now back to work.   The real good news from the last week and a half has been the lack of knee pain.  The lessons learned from the last week have been to never drink heavily the night before a long run.

After taking some extended time off two weeks ago to try to get the knee back to square, and a slow build up last week, I was able to pull of a 10 mile run with a friend of mine as well as a full week off maintenance runs and speed work this week with very little knee pain.  I was a little frustrated after my 10 miler last Saturday because the knee was sore during the run, and on the ride back home in the car, I felt it lock right up and hurt pretty bad.  I had to run into the grocery store and I must have looked like a real treat hobbling through the store, barely able to put pressure on the knee.  I was feeling pretty depressed at this point because I'm thinking this training may not work the way I want and the marathon may be in jeopardy.  Then I came home, stretched a little more and took a shower.  By the time I came out of the shower, the knee was fine and I haven't looked back sense.

Tomorrow I have 12 miles scheduled, that I may try to stretch to 13.1  depending on how I'm feeling.  Going to try to eat well today and see how it goes!

David's Story

Just in case I was thinking it was too cold to train this week.  This is why those that have supported me in this journey have and will continue to help make happen.

12 Mile Day

After a good week of maintenance and speed work, I had a 12 mile run to get in today.  This was my first long run with my new Garmin GPS and heart rate monitor.  It is really nice to have to keep an eye on where my heart rate is so I'm not putting too much stress on my heart.  As it relates to that I spoke for about ten minutes yesterday with my cardiologist to just get the okay from him.  He not only gave me the okay, but invited me to a half marathon with him up in New Hampshire.

The tough part about the run today wasn't the run, but more the fact that Brady didn't care that I had just run 12 miles and ran me ragged after the fact.  

Right now I'm dealing with some minor ached and pains that I'm holing out hope don't turn into anything serious. I've had both of the outside of my big toes feel like they are sprained or bruised for about 4 weeks now and they don't seem to be getting any better.   Now for the last week I've had pain on the top of my right knee cap that doesn't seem to restrict me in any way but it's just a pain.  Going to have to seek out some opinions this week to see what my best options are at this point.

Long Run Day

Today was my 7th long run in training toward a race goal.  This originally started as a reluctant agreement to run the Hampton Beach Half Marathon with a friend of mine and has turned into this. A chance to do something few have attempted and a chance to, with the help of friends and family, to make a difference with such a great cause.

Today's long run was an attempt to work on some strategy.  One of the things I've been doing is coming out of the gate too fast and I spend the rest of my long runs recovering and feeling like I'm struggling the whole way.   I don't have my new GPS watch yet, so I was just timing the overall run, but I was very deliberate in my first mile and a half plus to run at a very slow pace almost 9.5 plus minutes to give my body time to warm up and get into a groove.  This was a major change from last week where my first mile was at about an 8:30 pace.

One of the big pick ups from my reading about running this week is that even world class marathoners only run about 15 to 20% of their miles per week max at race pace.  Since my goal at this point is to run at a under 4 hours my race pace is going to be just under 9 mines a mile.  So my long runs should be at about a 9:20 to 9:30 pace with a focus on just adding miles on these days.  With my deliberate slow start, I felt very good through the whole run with only a little bit of knee flare up and muscle cramping but nothing major at all.  I felt so good that I kicked it up into a higher gear with about a mile plus to go and finished very string with a total 11 mile pace of under 9 minutes a mile.  I still have a lot of learning and a long way to go to get through the half marathon in February and the Boston rave in April but I feel good and strong and am excited about the future.

Now I need to spend some time getting my fund raising campaign up and running to reach my goal.

Monday Mornings

I had my long run this weekend.  After waking up early on a relatively warm Saturday, I received a text message from Chris Fuller telling me to swing by his shop to use his heart monitor and GPS on my run.  Again, learning on the fly here, I obliged and grabbed it.  Especially given my history of heart issues and surgery, after using it, it is going to be an investment that I make for this training and marathon to make sure that I don't overextend myself into a dangerous area.

For the run itself I really didn't feel so hot the whole run but the beauty of the heart monitor is that it keeps my pace right there on the watch.  After feeling pretty bad about 4 miles in, I decided to back off and only go 9 miles rather than the planned 11.  After looking down with about a mile and a half I saw my average pace go all the way down to 9:01 and I said to myself that there was no way I was going to finish with a pace above 9 minutes.  I was able to really dig in the last half mile and bring my average pace down to about 8:58 which was at least a good way to finish, even though I didn't feel well.

Today I got up early and with the still great weather for a December did a 3 plus mile run of interval training which was quite the way to start my week.  Those are the kind of workouts that are a killer but I need to do to  get better and faster come marathon time.

It's Official

I recieved the word thsi morning from the Leukemia and Lympoma Society that I have been accepted into the Team in Training program and have my spot for running the Boston Marathon in 2012.   It just so happened that I was at PR Running getting a fitting done for some new running shoes when the call came.  The staff at PR Running is fantastic and they really helped me to understand what they were looking for and how the right shoes will help.  I didn't really need to be sold on the concept of getting custom fit, as I know how very important it is with my golf game so it has to be similar here.  I ended up with a great new pair of Brooks Glycerine 9's that I'm psyched to break in tomorrow morning. 

Now comes the hard part, which will be raising the funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I'm working on getting the fundraising page set up and should be launching that along with this blog to the public in the next day or so.   I'm very excited to be raising money for such a great cause and am looking forward to having a lot of fun over the next five or six months.

Long Run Day

Yesterday was my long run day.  I've finally broken double digits and hit 10 miles yesterday.  When I started this process 5 weeks ago my first "long" run was 6 miles and I've been adding approximately a mile a week to my long runs.  I've then been supplementing those long runs with 2-4 mile maintenance runs 2-3 times a week.

After this weeks long run, I think I'm going to have a slow recovery week this week, probably only doing 2 days of maintenance runs to let my body recover a little.  I felt pretty sore this morning but after a shower and some play time with my boys I'm feeling much better.   This week I'm planning on heading over to a local running store in Westboro to have them look at the running and casual shows I've been wearing and get some feedback on new shoes and anything I can do to prevent any of these little nagging injuries that will be with me through the process.

I'm looking forward to hearing from the LLS hopefully at the beginning of the week so I can get the fundraising part of this journey under way to go with the training. We'll see what this week brings, either way I have had a nice Thanksgiving weekend with my healthy happy family and feel so very lucky to be in such a great place with my life right now.

Thanksgiving

Just got back from a fantastic meal at Amy's Aunt and Uncles house for Thanksgiving.  Sitting on the living room couch on the computer while Amy and Jack are curled up watching Peanuts on TV.  It's a neat little tradition she's had with him.

A day like today is good to help force you to stop and think about all of the great things in your life and it helps tie into why I'm starting out on this endeavor.   One of the interesting things that happened over the last couple days was in filling out the application for the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society one for the things that was asked is why are you choosing their organization to raise funds for to run in the marathon.  And as I sit and think about it today, this sort of started out as a way for me to check an event off the bucket list for my own selfish reasons and has now turned into something completely different. 

This morning before we went up to Wilmington to gather with the family, the four of us were just hanging out and spending time together.  Fortunately I was able to sit back through it all a realize how truly lucky I really am to have such happy and healthy boys in my life.  And to top it off to see how they interact with Amy and how great of a Mom she is to my boys really is just an amazing thing.  To see Brady and Jack running around the house this morning causing mayhem was really something special.   Their health and happiness is truly a blessing.

That coupled with the fact that this was the first major holiday that we all have gotten together since Amy's grandfather passed away from Leukemia earlier in the year really helps to bring all of this "stuff" together and make it fit into this perfect little puzzle in my life right now.

The fact that I don't have to spend my holiday at children's hospital making one of my boys with their cue ball head feel better from the every day battle of cancer is a blessing that I need to remind myself of every day when things seems to be bringing me down.  And now this running thing really seems like it should be relatively easy if I really keep this all in perspective.

So as I await my final approval from the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society to start my fundraising, it's with that gratefulness and hope that I can raise a few bucks so that I can hopefully help another dad out there who isn't as lucky as me can have a happy ending and enjoy a Thanksgiving with his kids like I did today.

The Start

11-23-11
I'm starting this blog today to chart my progress and help me to remember what I am doing and why.   The story starts about 5 weeks ago when Tom Flanagan, an attorney friend of mine, suggested that I run in the Hampton Beach half marathon with him in February of next year.  After jokingly saying sure, I thought about it and then started to take it a bit more seriously.  I had been going to the gym for since about May of this year trying to get back into some decent shape more for golf than anything else.   This just seemed like something to train for and work toward over the winter off season.  About four weeks ago I did my first 6 mile run, where I really worked on pacing myself and completing it without walking.  Since I have been slowly working up adding about a mile per week, running a long run on Saturday or Sunday and doing 2 or 3 weekly maintenance runs of 2-4 miles.  This last weekend I finished 9 miles feeling pretty good. Which brings me to this week.    

I have always in some way always thought about running the Boston Marathon.   It is sort of on my bucket list.   At this point if I keep adding a mile or so a week, I’ll be well past the 13.1 I’ll need for the February half marathon, so my thinking is that why not just keep on training through the winter and have myself ready to run 26.2.  So with that in mind I started to do some research about getting into the Boston Marathon. 

After looking around, you practically have to be half Kenyan just to qualify, doing a qualifying marathon in under 3:15 to qualify.  At this point my goal would be to finish in under 4 hours.   The only other route to go would be to get a guaranteed spot offered to about 25 charities that you have to raise 4k for to get your spot.   Looking a little further it made even a little more sense in that I could run this marathon, scratch this weird itch that I’ve had for some reason, and raise some money for a great cause at the same time, seems to make sense at this point in my life.

I contacted Jill Perriera from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society for a couple reasons.  I know that they are a reputable association from other friends doing fun raising for them as well as the fact that Amy’s grandfather whom she was very close with passed away earlier this year from Leukemia  and it would be nice to run in honor of a great man who helped shape my wife into the fantastic woman and mom that she is today.   I submitted my application yesterday and am awaiting a response from them probably beginning of next week at this point with the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow and the long weekend.

All if this stuff coming together over the last week or so and with some of the other events going on at the same time have brought me to an interesting and I feel like a changing point in my life.  At this point, I’ve only told Amy and my secretary Peggy that I’m planning on doing it and they both think I’m pretty much nuts.  Before I submitted the application to Leukemia and Lymphoma Society  I asked Amy if she thought I was biting off more than I could chew and she said, “ya, but that’s what we do”. 

It’s led me over the last day or so to contemplate where I am in my life and why on earth I’m doing this.  I’ve never been a runner, in fact I sort of don’t like it.  What I like about it is the time for myself and the sense of me against the road.  I guess I’ll have to get into that next time.