Michael & Liz are Bloggable

Well we're only 6 days away from the marathon now and I must say that I'm no longer confident about the race. My 8 mile run yesterday and 5 mile run this morning felt like I hadn't been training at all. Granted it is crazy hot and I didn't run them as early in the morning as I should have, but it just felt uncomfortable and to be completely candid, my lower abdominal pain is not gone. In fact it's actually feeling worse now than it was during my 22 mile run 2 weeks ago. I'm never one to go to the doctor for anything, but Liz may convince me to go if it's not gone in a couple weeks.

I guess a consolation is the fact that Liz isn't feeling as confident about her race either. Her runs have gone just like mine, she destroyed her run 2 weeks ago but struggled last week and this week. So unfortunately we are both feeling nervous and anxious. I say that's a consolation because I have the utmost confidence in her ability to go out and destroy her race, so what makes me think I can't do the same? 

Regardless of how I'm feeling now, there's no turning back or improving at this point. I've done what I've done and I have to accept that. I don't expect fist pumping happiness at the end of this race, which is sad because I've trained harder this time than any other race. As of Saturday, I will have run over 660 miles in 2011, so you can see why I have unrealistically high expectations for this race considering how much effort I've put into it

Well with Saturday's race, one goal ends and another will begin. I started the year at 187 and now I'm down to about 176. I've decided no more races or training until I'm at my goal weight of 160,  because after all, that was my "Operation Reese Cup" New Year's Resolution.  I always try and use races and training as a means for weight loss, but this time I'm doing it the other way around. I so badly want to keep training and racing but it's difficult to lose weight that way.

My original goal for Operation Reese Cup was to lose the weight by May, well that didn't quite happen so the deadline has been extended.

To accomplish this goal I'm going to start back up with P90X. It really seemed to do the trick 2 years ago when I tried it the first time and I want to try it again. Last time I made it 11 weeks before stopping, so hopefully I can make it all 90 days.

Once I hit 160, I'll set a new marathon goal and start training again. I would love to make this race my next goal, but we've traveled too much in the last year and another trip may be too much. We'll see, there's plenty of local races to run as well.

On top of my 160lb. goal, Liz has created a challenge for me in July that will assist me in my goal. I will blog about that separately though because I don't feel like writing a novel here.