Campaign Update

Wow, I am a little dismayed to find out that I have not updated this blog in nearly three weeks - not since my last fundraising update.  Time just flies by.  It seems like I get up, go to work, work out when I can, and the weekends pass like blurs.

In the last 2.5 weeks, I have been to Saturday training a couple of times, done some training on my own (but not enough), and sandwiched in a great trip to backpack for the weekend on Shackleford Banks, an uninhabited island off the North Carolina coast.  See my other blog, Oh, To Be Hiking, for more information and photos.  Even though I have been back for 10 days, I still have more to post about my adventures there.  It was a blast, trust me.  Not always comfortable, not always easy, but a blast all the same.

As far as training is concerned, our Saturday routes have been five or six miles.  My mid-week training is not as organized as it should be, but I manage plenty of time on my feet.  And even the weekend I missed, while hiking on the barrier island, I got plenty of miles on my feet - an estimated 37 miles in two days.  This last Saturday, our six mile training route was one of my favorites - over the Nickel Bridge to the gorgeous city neighborhoods on the south side of the James.  Here is a photo as we crossed over the river, looking upriver to the majestic railroad bridge with its amazing design.

I'll miss Saturday training this week, but should be able to make the next two or three weekends.

On the fundraising front, I have reached about 31% of my fundraising goal thanks to many generous people.  It is time to get out another campaign update next week.  This time, my theme will be of a less serious vein - rumors about Art and Team in Training.  My last note, about my sister Ann and others who are no longer here because of cancer, was kind of heavy, and I want to write something lighter and more tongue in cheek.

Mentor Captain

Well, I'll be trying a new role with Team in Training with the spring team: mentor captain.

Now in case you think I will be commanding a ship or something like that, nothing of the kind. I'll be working with the mentors for the team and trying to help them help their mentorees in a very tough fund raising economy. It will be an interesting experience, and I hope that I can be useful in that role. In every other TNT event I have done, I only was involved with the marathon teams. In the capacity of mentor captain, I will work with mentors for the marathon, triathlon, and century cycle teams. I'll look forward to working with this fine group of volunteers, several of whom are prior teammates.

Tomorrow is the Light the Night walk. I am really looking forward to it.

Here is a photo my friend Kristi took of me after Saturday's information meeting. I like the fall colors in it, and of course, I am dressed in blue - suitable for a captain, wouldn't you say?

The Topics You Voted For

A few weeks ago, I conducted a poll on my blog about the topics you most want me to write about during the time period up until I start training and fund raising for my next event. I didn't get a lot of people voting, but here is a summary of what visitors to this blog voted for:

Humorous reflections on things - 75%

A survivor’s mind – what are we thinking and how is it different than before cancer - 62%

Inspirational stories about people I meet along the way or have heard about - 37%

Tales from past TNT events - 12%

Tales from my cancer experience - 12%

Ways to cope for people with cancer, their family, and friends - 12%

Training updates (I am not training for a specific event right now) - 12%

Reflections on TNT and the war on cancer - 0%

I appreciate everyone's feedback, and I will try to use these as guidelines for upcoming blog posts. For example, I'll try to write something funny (humor is in the mind of the beholder) at least every week or so. I like writing funny stuff, for this blog and in general (like the story of how I bought my first car, which is not on this blog - too long and doesn't really fit "racing for a cure.")

I know that I have not posted a lot about the second most popular topic (a survivors mind) and so I will try to pay more attention to that in upcoming months.

And while the three most popular topics need to get more attention, I will certainly write about the other topics at times as well - depending on what comes to mind at the time.

And of course, if there is something specific you want me to write about, send me an email or post a comment and I will try to accomodate you.

Thanks again to all of you who voted.

I Want You - To Vote!

A couple of week agos, I set up a poll asking what types of things you would like me to blog about in the time between now and starting training and fundraising for my next Team in Training event (I decided not to retire).

As of this post, only seven people have voted. Now, I don’t know how many people check this blog at least every week, but I know it is more than five. I seem to average about 10 – 25 visits a day, with less on weekends. So c’mon! Cast your votes.

I say “votes” because you can vote for as many of the topics as you wish. So let me know what you want to read about, and I will do my best to write things as often as possible that fit that subject area.

Unlike so many votes around the world, this one is not crooked or rigged. And it is totally anonymous – I cannot tell who voted or how they voted any more than I could do an Ironman triathlon tomorrow.

So if you are American, or from a democratic country elsewhere, exercise your right to vote! And if you are coming here from a country where you don’t have the right to vote freely and fairly, here on my blog you have that right – so exercise it!

So no excuses – vote for the topics you most want to hear about!

Thanks for voting! And have a great weekend!

Does Wellsphere Scam Bloggers?

In mid-July, while I was on vacation, I received a very flattering and interesting proposal from Wellsphere, which began as follows:

“Hi Racn4acure ,My name is Dr. Geoff Rutledge, and I am delighted to invite you to join Wellsphere's HealthBlogger Network, the world's premier network of health writers …”

You can view the entire e-mail here. In a nutshell, the email praised my blog and writing, and offered to increase my blog readership through their Health Blogger Network, as well as providing innovative new features for my blog. It stressed that while I was giving them permission to republish what I had written on Wellsphere, I would retain all ownership of my content, and they would not make other use of my content without my permission.

The email was effusive in its praise and in the benefits of joining their blogger network. Even so, I was busy at the time, and figured I would get back to it later. I got a reminder email two weeks later and at that point - without even taking two seconds and checking it out independently – I joined up. I did click on the link in the email that displayed the terms and conditions of joining Wellsphere. It was fairly similar to what Geoff Rutledge had said in his email, with the exception that it clearly said that I was giving them permission to republish my material in any form they wanted, without compensation to me. But even so, it stressed that I was the owner of the intellectual property. The link to these terms of service is here and here.

Nearly a week went by, and I just kept blogging without giving it much more thought. Then I got an email from a friend and fellow blogger to beware of Wellpshere, because they had been implicated in scamming bloggers. She gave some details about some harder to find terms and conditions that essentially would give Wellsphere ownership of my content. The note, in part, said: “However, when you read the "terms and conditions" which appear to be upfront but the reality is they are elsewhere on the site and much more detailed. The bottom line is that you loose ALL copyright to your work on your blog, past, present and future. They cleverly word it so you THINK you retain all rights but you do not. They can do what they want with your posts, make money from it and you loose all rights. They make money off your blog and you could not use your own work to say publish a book in the future. They retain the copyright.” The suggestion was to Google “Wellsphere scam”, which I did.

Holy crap! I got all kinds of hits with Google and started reading some of them. This was scary stuff! There were a lot of seriously pissed-off people out there! Had I indeed just inadvertently given away the rights to everything I wrote on my Racing for a Cure blog? How can they tell you one thing and then secretly have something else take precedence over that? I started digging around on Wellsphere’s site beyond what I looked at before, and found language here that included some really alarming stuff. Included were these two nuggets:

Ownership: “All Website Materials, including any intellectual property rights in such Website Materials, are the property of Wellsphere, its affiliates, licensors, or the designated owners, and are protected by applicable intellectual property laws.”

Content You Submit to or Post on the Website: “… You agree that any and all comments, information, photos, videos, feedback and ideas that you communicate to Wellsphere or submit or post to the Website or give Wellsphere permission to post to the Website (“User Materials”) will be deemed, at the time of communication to Wellsphere or submission or posting to the Website, to be the property of Wellsphere…”

This was clearly in opposition to any of the more obvious conditions that I had been fed. I am not a lawyer, and have no idea how the law interprets one rule that says I retain ownership and another from the same entity that says they are now the owner. But my guess is that if this was Wellsphere’s intent, they would have had a really good team of lawyers come up with this language.

In any event, given what I had seen using Google, and this conflicting language, I decided to pull out of Wellsphere immediately. I emailed them and said for them to delete all my content and my profile. To their credit, I got a message back from Dr. Rutledge in less than 30 minutes telling me that this had been done, and that my content was also deleted from their servers. Of course with computers, it is impossible to know for sure, so I printed and saved records of everything.


To continue reading this post, go here.

Does Wellsphere Scam Bloggers? (continued)

Continued from part 1

After reading a bunch of the articles I found – just Google “wellsphere scam” and you will see the same articles – and thinking about it for a while, I realized that best case, I had entered into this way too hastily. I should have at the least used Google myself prior to committing to be a Wellsphere Health Blogger. I had been seduced by the flattery in the note. But there was a huge clue in the soliciting e-mail that should have told me that this was just a mass produced come-on: the introduction:

“Dear Racn4acure:”

Anyone spending five minutes on my blog would be able to know my first name. Anyone spending 15 – 30 minutes and doing some poking around on links could learn my full name. Obviously no one had. They looked at the fact that I wrote about cancer in some way, saw that I posted things fairly regularly, and decided to see if they could add me to their blogger list with a flattering note. By stroking the ego of people who write, they got plenty of takers, including me for a week. And had my friend not filled me in, I’d probably still be part of Wellsphere.

Now if I were still a member, what would I be giving up? At the very least, if they really liked what I wrote, and published it as a book either by itself or with some works of other bloggers, and it became a best seller, they would not owe me a dime. Clearly, the conditions they listed right up front gave them that right. Thinking about it quite a bit since, I think that was foolhardy on my part.

Now worst case, what if I used my blog postings to create a book? Or say I wrote a book, and used a few of my blog postings in it? Let’s say it became a best seller (go along with me here, people, as farfetched as it sounds) and earned me a million dollars. If the terms of the more stringent section applied, in theory, Wellsphere could sue me because their loading my writing automatically gave them intellectual property rights and ownership of everything I wrote on my blog. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants – to be sued by someone because you published your own writings?

Not being a lawyer, it is impossible for me to know if (1) this latter scenario could happen and (2) if it was deliberately set up by Wellsphere’s lawyers to sucker and scam bloggers. But I was not willing to take the chance, and there are enough people out there saying very negative and angry things about Wellsphere to make me leery. The world wide web can be a very nasty place, so caveat emptor.

One of Wellsphere’s claims in their pitch was that readership of your blog would increase if you became a Wellsphere health blogger. But upon looking at the posts of bloggers who’s content was placed in Wellsphere, all of their blog links were internal. In other words, when you clicked on one of their posts shown in Wellsphere, it would go to that post in Wellsphere, not in their blog. There was a link to the author’s blog in their Wellsphere profile, but all other links to their material stayed within Wellsphere. So the claim that it would increase readership seems unlikely.

So does Wellsphere deliberately scam bloggers? Well, I don’t know how to definitely answer that. If they deliberately set up conflicting terms of service so that they can claim intellectual property to anything that a blogger writes, then clearly the answer is yes. But even if this is not the case, by allowing them to publish what you write, you clearly are giving them the right to use your stuff in any form they choose and make money on it without any compensation to you. That seems like a bad deal in exchange for possibly a few more people dropping by your blog – if they don’t just choose to read your blog totally within Wellsphere’s portal.

So for this blogger, the negatives and potential negatives far outweighed any potential gains that I might realize, once I got over the heady flattery of being chosen to be a Wellsphere Health Blogger. What I write may never make me rich – it may never even earn me a dollar – but it is my creation, and I am not willing to give the possibility of earning a buck to someone else for no compensation. And I am certainly not willing to risk giving away my intellectual property to someone else through a possible weasel clause created by clever lawyers. So therefore, I, for one, will remain unaffiliated with Wellsphere.

What Topics Do You Want to Hear About?

I’d like to keep this blog rolling in the long period between the event in April and kicking off my next TNT season, probably sometime in 2010. So far, it has been 4 months, and I have been writing about what strikes my fancy at any time. But it is also an ideal time for a poll to see what people who visit think. What topics do you most like me to write about and post? Please send comments about anything specific, or anything not covered in the poll. Here are the topics I’ve come up with. Multiple answers are allowed.

A survivor’s mind – what are we thinking and how is it different than before cancer

Inspirational stories about people I meet along the way or have heard about

Tales from past TNT events

Tales from my cancer experience

Reflections on TNT and the war on cancer

Ways to cope for people with cancer, their family, and friends

Humorous reflections on things

Training updates (I am not training for a specific event right now)

This and That

First, thanks to the three people that voted on my poll about my best post. I didn't get a whole lot of interest this time, although "Relentless!" edged out "Look! There's One of the Leukemia Society People!" by two votes to one. I will try to think of a more interesting topic for my next poll. Hmmm, how about one about sex? Ah-ah, peaked your interest? Stay tuned, because it won't be quite what you are thinking...

I’ve not done a ton of working out since the half-marathon nearly four months ago, but now and then I will walk or walk/run some miles. Actually, this past Sunday, I walked a total of 10 miles. Four miles were early in the morning, a fast walk using my favorite local route. A short bit of this was running, but my back was hurting a bit and hurt more when I ran. One thing is clear – almost all of my hard-earned running gains of this past season are gone from not running often enough. But I can still walk with good speed and power.

The remaining six miles of my ten mile day were a hike at Spotsylvania Courthouse Battlefield that very hot afternoon. I made the mistake of only taking a liter of water along, and was pretty parched and a little dizzy at the end. It was a rookie mistake for someone who has not been a rookie in a long time. But even so, it feels good to have enough strength to walk ten miles despite not getting nearly as much exercise the past few months as became my habit.

At the end of the day, I did feel twinges of pain in my left foot Sunday, telling me that my neuroma is still going to try to be part of my life. It is hard to see where this will go. I hope to go for a long and hard mountain hike soon, and this will tell me more.

Over an eight day period, I will experience two cool survivor events. The first was last Friday when I was a fashion model in the American Cancer Society’s fashion by design show. That was something totally different, and a lot of fun! The next will be this coming Saturday, when the Richmond Fall Team does the Silent Mile. Several of us survivors will speak to the teams – marathon, triathlon, and cycle – before training. Then we will hold signs thanking participants at various points along the way for the first mile as everyone goes by on bike or foot. There will be no talking or cheering during this mile as we remember the struggles of cancer patients everywhere.

The weather has been very hot here the last two weeks. I am looking forward to cooler days ahead. I hope to get back into more intense workouts, and more hiking in the cool weather. I still need to lose about 4 of the 6 pounds I gained since stopping marathon training!

Confidence!

Wow! In a few days, I’ll be sauntering down a runway at the American Cancer Society's fashion show. Bright lights! Dolled-up people! Big crowds of spectators staring at me! In my worst case scenario, I trip over my feet and fall flat on my face.

It could happen but I don’t plan on it. My secret weapon will be confidence. I told my friend Jackie what I am up to and she gave me this advice: when you walk down that runway, all eyes on you, say to yourself “I’m wealthy, great looking, brilliant, and all the women want me!” She said that will give me the confidence to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving along. Maybe, although all of that might be stretching the truth just a tad! Of course, if my lottery ticket comes in tonight, that will take care of wealthy part!

In any event, it is for a good cause and it should be kind of fun – totally out of character for me, but fun all the same. I am looking forward to the rehearsal Friday afternoon. The whole bunch of us will spend all afternoon rehearsing together, going over the show step by step four times. Then we will break to get some food – always good – and spend three hours getting dressed and made up. Three hours??? Are you kidding me? In my case, it shouldn’t take more than about 3 minutes. Hopefully, the guys won’t wear makeup, right? After all that, the show will go on well into the night, hopefully before a great crowd. When my turn comes to walk out there, I will try to project confidence, or at least not to trip!

One thing I do know is that I will be inspired by all of my fellow cancer survivors, dressed up and strutting for a great cause!

Vote for My Best Post!

I've been updating this blog for about a year now, once I got done back-posting all of my Arizona Marathon information. So I thought it would be fun to do another poll, in part to see how many people actually read my blog, about what my best post is. Here are the ones I think are the best. What do you think? I'm leaving the poll open until August 15.

Relentless - In my view, this poem pretty well summarizes my feelings about why I do Team in Training.

Look! There's One of Leukemia Society People - seeing a young girl in Nashville two days before the race reminded me once again how important this mission is.

I'll Take the Fifth - How Beethoven's Fifth Symphomy helped get me through chemo seven years ago

The Little Red Devil and the Little White Angel - My debate of whether to do a full or half marathon this season was joined by two little beings

The Attack Ad - John McCain and Barack Obama weren't the only two slinging mud last fall!

Something Else - if you vote for this, please comment and tell me which one you liked best that was not one of the above choices.

Original Approach from Wellsphere

This is the email I received in mid-July from Wellsphere asking me to join them. Go here to read my article about this.


Hi Racn4acure ,


My name is Dr. Geoff Rutledge, and I am delighted to invite you to join Wellsphere's HealthBlogger Network, the world's premier network of health writers, which now includes over 2,000 of the Web's leading health bloggers! We reviewed your blog, and based on the high quality of your writing, the frequency of your posts, and your passion for helping others, we think you would be a great addition to the Network. It is easy and free to join the HealthBlogger Network, all you have to do is reply to this message and let us know you would like to participate.


As a member of the HealthBlogger Network, you'll enjoy the greatly expanded reach and exposure to Wellsphere's more than 5 million monthly visitors, innovative special features and functionality for your blog, and an exclusive badge to recognize you as a leading health blogger. Once you join, we'll begin promoting you and your blog as a great source of health knowledge and support, featuring you in rotation on our homepage (http://www.wellsphere.com/), republishing your posts on Wellsphere, giving you special status on Wellsphere and linking back to your blog from your articles and from your profile.


THERE IS NO COST FOR YOU TO JOIN and YOU RETAIN OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL of the content that you allow Wellsphere to republish. Here are the key terms of the straightforward HealthBlogger Participation Agreement, which you can see at http://www.wellsphere.com/forBloggers.s :

* You retain full ownership and copyright to your content


* You grant us the right to republish your content on Wellsphere.com


* You can revoke your permission, and we will remove your content from the site

* Wellsphere (and also HealthCentral) will not make any other use of your content without your permission


Let me tell you a bit about me and about Wellsphere. I'm a physician who has taught and practiced Internal and Emergency Medicine for over 25 years at Harvard and Stanford medical schools, and am passionate about helping people get the information and support they need to be healthier. I'm now the Chief Medical Information Officer at Wellsphere.com, where I manage the HealthBlogger Network. Wellsphere, the fastest-growing consumer health website, is revolutionizing the way people find and share health and healthy living information and support. We've recently merged with The HealthCentral Network, Inc. (http://www.healthcentral.com/), and together we're now serving more than 10 million people a month!


I would like to invite you to join the HealthBlogger Network as a featured blogger in the Cancer Community. Once you join the HealthBlogger Network, we will automatically republish the blog posts that you've already written and the ones you write in the future (so you don't have to re-post them yourself, and there's no extra work for you!). We will feature them not only on the community pages of the site, but also on numerous relevant WellPages, where we give users a comprehensive view of expert information, news, videos, local resources, and member postings on topics you write about. All of your articles that are republished on Wellsphere will include a link back to your blog, and your Wellsphere profile page will show your special status as a featured blogger on Wellsphere (and will include another link back to your blog). By connecting to the Wellsphere platform, you will greatly expand the audience for your postings, attract additional readers to your blog, and receive much deserved recognition for your efforts to improve peoples' lives.


You will also receive from us a special badge for your blog recognizing you as a Top Health Blogger, and gain access to features and functionality for your blog that we've created especially for members in the HealthBlogger Network, including a custom tailored Health Knowledge Finder search widget, a Wellevation widget that provides daily motivational tips for your members, and a Wellternatives widget that offers nutrition information and healthier suggestions at popular chain restaurants.


If you would like to join the HealthBlogger Network, just reply to this message and say yes.


Congratulations on being selected to participate in the Health Blogger Network! If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email to Dr.Rutledge@wellsphere.com, or call me at the number below.


Good health,
Geoff

Don't Forget to Vote!

No, not in primaries if your state had them. On my opinion poll to the upper right hand side of my blog! You can go to this post to see more information about the choices. I'd just like to see what readers of this blog think on this topic.

So far 17 people have voted (Nike Womens' Marathon is in the lead) and you have only 6 days left to cast your ballot! :)

The Miles are Piling Up

I’ve been keeping track of my steps and miles since Friday, January 9, or for about two months now. I use a week starting with Friday and ending with Thursday.

I’ve not reported on this for some time now, but thought I would jot out a quick post about my mileage for the last month. Since I have decided to train for the half marathon, not the full, the training miles won’t be totally outrageous. Here are my miles for the four weeks between Friday February 6 and Thursday March 5:

Week ending Training Miles Total Miles
2/12 -------------- 28.3 ------------ 50.8
2/19 -------------- 32.3 ------------ 58.6
2/26 -------------- 26.9 ------------ 53.0
3/5 --------------- 23.7 ------------ 49.5

For that four week period, I trained 111 miles and traveled on foot approximately 212 miles. The later includes my training miles and all my miscellaneous walking during the week – up 7 flights of stairs at work multiple times a day, walking to points in the office, taking a quick walk at lunch, and so forth.

The rate that my training miles are accumulating tells me that I may need a new pair of shoes by the time of the half-marathon, something I would dearly love to avoid if at all possible. I bought my shoes on February 1, and the majority of those 111 training miles are on these shoes. At this rate, I will have nearly 300 miles on the shoes by the date of my race.

The Curious Seasons of TNT

Since 2005, I have been with Team in Training for five teams, including one season as a non-fundraising mentor. These include the “summer” team three times, one “winter” team, and my current team, “spring”. Ah, spring – sounds pretty nice doesn’t it? And those three summer teams sound pretty idyllic – early morning runs in the cooler start of the day, pretty summer flowers, maybe a dip in a lake afterwards.

Well, not so fast! TNT seasons are named after the approximate time of year of the events. So the “summer” teams had their events in late April to mid-June, which I always think of as spring. In fact, my first time or two, I kept referring to it as the “spring” team.

Our summer teams started training about the first of February, and often in cold and nasty weather. As the winter gave way to spring, we often saw beautiful flowers, listened to birds – and trained in heavy rain-storms. We never trained in summer weather on the summer teams, the last event being the Anchorage marathon just before the Summer Solstice.

Our “fall” teams, which I have not yet been on, essentially train through the hot Virginia summers, starting about the end of May and continuing through October. Often they start training at 6AM or even earlier on Saturdays to escape some of the heat. I would guess at the end, they get some of the nice fall weather, but one of our cornerstone “fall” events is the Rock “N” Roll Half-Marathon at Virginia Beach, held Labor Day weekend. It is almost always hotter than hell for this race, and even though everyone has a great time, fall it is not.

Then there is the “winter” team, which I was on last time for the Arizona marathon of 2008 in Phoenix. Of the teams I have been on, we actually trained through the nicest weather on the “winter” team. We started in mid-August, and went into mid-January, with a lot of fall-like weather, beautiful fall foliage, cool mornings and warm days. Of course, there was also that cold drenching rain in late December where several of us had bad colds and all of us were soaked from our heads to our toes within about a half mile. The bunch I was training with decided after 10 miles that we had had enough, cutting the final two miles off.

As for my current team, the “spring” team, we have not had much spring like weather to date. We started training in early November, and have gone right through the winter months. Five degrees one morning, so cold that our salt-laden Gator Aide turned to slush. Plenty of cold and windy weather where your core is warm and sweaty from exertion but your face and fingers are frozen. Then, the other night, it was so mild and spring-like that I did my 4 miles in the dark with just shorts and a tee-shirt. Especially since I have another cold, it was a pleasure not to be out in cold weather. And I have noticed more birds singing in the early morning, and the longer periods of daylight in the evening. These are all signs of the approaching spring, at which point my spring team will be aptly named. I think that everyone on the team looks forward to the days just ahead when mild weather is the norm, when the early flowers start to bloom.

Even though the seasons of our teams seem a little mixed up at times, the experience itself, in any weather, is joyful. I feel so blessed to be healthy enough to participate with Team in Training. Spring, summer, fall or winter, we are changing lives one mile at a time!

TGIF!

Well, just a quick post this relaxing Friday evening...

First, my miles for the week were not bad, despite missing 13 miles of training due to extremely sore quads. I trained for 23.7 miles and traveled a total of 49.9 miles on foot, from last Friday through yesterday.

Second, we had a great injury prevention clinic for the team last night, led by Dr. Tim Dey, who is also a team coach for the fall season every year and, very impressively, a TNT Triple Crown recipient. We had a small turnout, but most of us there were nursing one ailment or another as the miles add up, so we covered some "what to do when you get (whatever)" in addition to injury prevention and core conditioning. As Tim said, it sounds a little late for injury prevention right now - we need to get through the season and complete our event. Interestingly, not one biker or tri-athlete was there.

Third, I spoke as a survivor at the Summer Team Kick-off Wednesday, and it was a lot of fun. For one thing, I knew most of the coaches and mentors who showed up, including some that I hadn't seen in a while. I always enjoy thanking participants as a cancer survivor for what they are doing to help cure cancer.

Tomorrow is long training - 16 miles if I can do it. I will need to see what the coaches think. I still have some soreness and have taken it pretty easy since Saturday, and I don't want to overdo it. But I don't want to get too far behind either.

Friday Musings

I’ll just throw out a hodge-podge of thoughts tonight.

First, TGIF!!! Two days off from work, and even better, a training free day! My legs are always a little tired by Friday. This morning, I even took the elevator at work, seven floors up, which I almost never do. With 14 miles to do come morning, I tried to take it easy today, but still put over 9,000 steps on my pedometer.

Tomorrow, Team Richmond does a road trip to train with Team Charlottesville, about 70 miles from here. I imagine we will all be starved after training and will do a team meal – guilt-free calories. It is supposed to be fairly cold – low 20s – but dry, which sounds fine after the mess we had earlier this week.

Miles for the week: In the last seven days (Friday to Thursday), I trained 30.3 miles and traveled on foot a total of about 54.4 miles. That translates to just over 100,000 steps in 7 days.

I really need new shoes! Mine are about 15 months old and I did the Arizona Marathon in them over a year ago! I was blogging about needing new shoes months ago!

I got all my training done this week, even though Wednesday’s seven miles was on the treadmill, a rarity for me as most miles I do are outdoors. But I can see doing some more treadmill sessions – I like the idea of keeping an exact running pace while I try to figure out the best pace for continuing to do more running. Somewhere in there is a running pace that I can maintain for a much longer distance. When I run outside, I must go just a bit faster than is comfortable, because I usually start to get winded within 5 – 7 minutes.

Finally, I signed up for the Monument Avenue 10K for the fifth year in a row. I am shooting to beat last year’s PR of about 1 hour 9 minutes. It is an amazingly fun race – 35,000 runners and walkers. For the first time, Team in Training will have a fund-raising team in this race, so I will look for the Purple People and cheer them on when I run this race.