Miles to run

The Marine Corps Marathon is my goal race this year. Everything else is just for fun. There are miles to be run in pursuit of that marathon. Many, many miles.


The weather has turned into full on summer here. Sadly, that has been a huge setback for me in terms of endurance, pace, and excitement to hit the road. The one thing keeping me going is that I really love the women I'm running with these days (same group I've been with for over a year). They are just this amazing source of can-do.


One of the (many) things we've done so far this year was the GW Parkway Classic 10 miler. That race is coordinated by one of the local running stores, and it is top notch from start to finish. They even allow people who are worried about hitting the course cutoff time to start super early. If that does not tell you there are races for everyone, I don't know what would.


There are a bajillion fun races in the area - a quick search on Eventbrite yielded many in the next few weeks - varying from mud runs (Ed and I joined friends for one of these 3 years ago), to moonbounce runs (a couple of friends tried this last year), to low-key 5Ks, and even some pretty big endurance event. If you, like me, lack motivation - a race to look forward to can keep you on track with training.


The bonus of signing up for an event via Eventbrite is that you'll get notified of similar events in the future. We've used their ticketing system to attend a lot of children's events, which has yielded emails about some great events that I wouldn't have known about otherwise. I am considering using their "sell tickets" feature for a few school activities I'm organizing in the upcoming year. On the surface, it at least looks easy to use - and the fees are fairly modest.


But...back to my tired self...I've kept my racing lineup to a minimum, because although they provide motivation, they also take a ton of extra time - and it works best for me to minimize my run time on what tend to be busy weekends. That said, I joined a Ragnar team with my friends, and that race is going to be run with only smiles, I promise. Ragnar is a 200 mile relay race from Cumberland, MD to DC. It actually gets super close to my home towards the end, which I think will be fun. Of the 12 women on my team, a handful will also run MCM, so I suspect it'll be our training run for the weekend.


But now, in June, I am looking at my tired self, looking at my friend's race plan which calls for a 14 mile run this weekend, and wondering how the heck am I going to do this?


To my running friends - just get out there! The heat will break eventually, right?


Elaine