The other concern is the Half Marathons I have planned this summer/fall as well – one is August 1st, the other is September 6th. I would like to put in a bit of a taper for the August race, but may just use the September race as a long run. I’m not sure I can get the proper training in for the marathon if I have two full tapers just a couple of weeks apart.

I’m trying something new here with automatically updating my Twitter and Facebook status when I post a new blog entry. Some people may find it irritating, so I may disable it, or just not use it for every post. If you have strong feelings either way, feel free to let me know.

I started this past Saturday with my long run. The FIRST plan calls for three runs per week, plus at least two days of cross-training, which isn’t too different from what I have been doing lately just because of schedule constraints. This plan, however, calls for much faster paced runs than what i had been doing, and my long run pace needed to be adjusted accordingly. Normally I would run around 8:00/mile pace for long runs and my easy runs, but FIRST calls for running long runs at Half Marathon Pace + 20 seconds, closer to 7:20/mile than 8:00. I was worried I would feel too tired by the end of the 9 miles to keep that pace, but I was surprisingly energetic by the end.

Then last night I had my first “Key Workout #1″ which was 5 x 1000m @ 5:58/mile pace. The tough part about this for me will be keeping track of my pace on the treadmill. I’ve found that my Nike+ iPod system isn’t terribly accurate on a treadmill, especially at faster speeds. Most of my intervals which were at a much faster pace, didn’t show as much faster as they should have. So I guess I’m not really sure how closely I hit the pace, but at the very least I know I got a good workout in, and it was better than the 5 or 6 easy miles I would have done otherwise.

I’ll probably spin tonight on our new spin bike (that’s another post altogether), and tomorrow night is my first FIRST tempo run. I’ll try to update here as often as I remember to, in case anyone is interested in how the program works.

So I have decided to participate in the Chicago Marathon as a St. Jude Hero. My fundraising efforts will directly support the work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to find cures and save the lives of children fighting cancer and other deadly diseases, and I am asking for your help! Click here to go to my donation page, or ccontinue reading below for more on why St. Jude’s is a worthy cause.

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, founded by the late entertainer Danny Thomas, is one of the world’s premier pediatric cancer research centers. Children from all 50 states and from around the world have come through the doors of St. Jude for treatment, and thousands more around the world have benefited from the research conducted at St. Jude – research that is shared freely with the global medical community. St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatments that are not covered by insurance. No child is denied treatment because of a family’s inability to pay.

St. Jude is unlike any other pediatric cancer treatment and research facility. Discoveries made by St. Jude have completely changed how the world treats children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases. With research and patient care under one roof, St. Jude is where some of today’s most gifted researchers are able to do science more quickly.

Danny Thomas believed that “no child should die in the dawn of life.” Please make a donation to support my efforts for St. Jude and join the fight against childhood cancer. You can read some stories of a few brave St. Jude patients, and find out where your donation goes.

Thanks for helping me reach my goal for the kids of St. Jude!

I’m still considering running the Chicago Marathon for charity. If and when i make that decision, I’ll be sure to update here.

My running, on the other hand, has been delayed. My knee is still bothering me a bit from Disney, but it’s getting better. I may try to run a few easy miles tomorrow, otherwise I’ll just skip the first week of my nine week plan altogether. It’s better to rest now and be fully healed for the end than risk aggravating the injury now.

I also decided to start the One Hundred Pushups Challenge again. I went through it once before, and it definitely got my pushup max higher, but I never got to 100. So this time I’m hoping to do it right, and not move on until I get the proper max, and hopefully end up with a max of 100 pushups at once. The plan has you doing between 5 and 8 sets of pushups, with a structured amount of rest in between sets. It gets progressively higher, and is aimed at getting to 100 in six weeks. I’m not sure I can do it in six, but Day One last night already went better than I remember from the first time through. I hit all of the first four sets, and maxed out at 20 on the fifth set, where the goal is just nine. I’ll try to at least post my max every day I do it (Mon, Wed, Fri), if not some more thoughts on how it’s going.

Clock Time: 1:35:52
Chip Time: 1:35:14
Overall Place: 246
Division Place: 24

And my Garmin data is available here – http://connect.garmin.com/activity/22331046.

Overall, I’m very happy with my results. 246th overall out of over 17,000 finishers is pretty decent. I was about a minute off of my PR, but considering the weather I’m not surprised. It was below freezing at the start, and started raining/snowing/sleeting just before we headed over to the start line. It turned into a light but steady rain just before the gun went off, and stayed that way the whole time. I got a pretty bad cramp around mile 7, so that slowed me down a bit. Other than that, I felt pretty good the whole time.

The way the race start is staggered, I had to wait for Megan for almost an hour, which was miserable in the cold rain, but at least I was able to hid behind the refreshment tent and stay out of the wind. When she finished, we were able to get a picture together, which actually turned out ok.

I’ll hopefully put some pictures of the rest of our trip up on Facebook later, so keep an eye out for those.