St. Jude Marathon Week 2

 Week 2 is complete. I finished it today as a matter of fact with a 7 mile run. I was reading on Facebook yesterday how Ellie Mae is back at St. Jude for treatment. She will have to keep going back for treatment for a few years even though she is in remission. The more that I am following in her journey the more I realize that cancer sucks even more than I initially thought.

For those of you that don't know because I don't think that I have shared; last December my niece Ellie Mae was diagnosed with Lymphoma. There are two types of Lymphoma and they found that she has both of them which shouldn't have happened. Most, well up until her I believe she is one of the only or few that has gotten both types. She has been in and out of hospitals since she got a diagnosis.

I got into running the St. Jude marathon because I was actually training for a half marathon at Disney World and I downloaded a bunch of podcasts and heard a lady talking about her experience at the marathon and I looked it up and saw that the race was this December and I thought that I wasn't going to be ready for the race. I left it alone and wrote it down on my race bucket list that I made.

When my oldest son went back home with his father I started looking at races and I wanted to do the Puerto Rice marathon but we thought that it wasn't a smart financial decision so I went and looked up St. Jude and we can just say that the stars aligned LOL. I signed up for the race that day and that was that.

So now that you have the back story as to why I am running and who Ellie is, I will tell you about Week 2.

This week I dropped the PiYo and I started doing the 21 Day Fix Extreme workouts. I don't want to lose the strength that I do have so I opted to try this instead and every Sunday do some yoga so tomorrow I will see how that fairs for me. I am doing Upper Fix, Lower Fix, Cardio, and Plyo. Friday I rest before my long run so I am running 4 days and doing strength for 4 days and yoga for 1 day. We will see how it goes so far so good.

My biggest problem is toning it down and keeping myself from running so my runs were all over the place. One run was at a 10 min pace and 1 was at 8:59, another I was at 9:07 and another at 9:12. I don't really know what I want my pace to be! I guess this is a reason well, one of the many that training is so long so I can figure it out. I do not have any speed drills or anything on my training plan they are all easy runs and my long run. I think that I am going to make my marathon pace somewhere between 9:00-9:30 and then keep my long runs and easy runs at a 10:00 pace?? We will see what I come up with.

I am still really motivated and still feel all the excitement of running a marathon because it is so far away still but I have had a few moments where I freaked the hell out asking myself how in the WORLD am I going to get 26.2 miles done! HA HA HA HA! I keep to my motto that God will be there with me and Ellie Mae will be there in my thoughts and while she is battling this disgusting cancer I will be running for her. While she is in bed and should be playing and running with her brothers and friends I will be running with her in mind and take her with me :)