july 16: today i earned my breakfast!

and what a great and glorious breakfast it is! i had lots of green smoothie left over from last night, so i added 3 more nanas to it, making it a 5-nana concoction, which is now the lovely green of split pea soup, only brighter and fresher! it's deeeeeee-lish!

and here's what i did to earn it! i went for a morning run down to the lake - i ran all the way there to my turnaround point, and then walked back up. this is almost twice as much as i did the other day! so tomorrow, the challenge is to run THROUGH the turnaround point and all the way back up to the drain bridge. i don't know how far these distances are, or how long it's taking me. i'm just kind of going by how i feel. this morning it felt great to go to the turnaround, and i didn't want to do more. what i am going to do is push myself to go a little harder, a little further, a little faster, each day.

last night, in addition to everything else i'm working on, i made my commitment to myself to run my marathon. i've decided to sign up for San Diego again. i ran SD in 2001. i was 31 years old, heavier than i am now (my race weight then was my OMG i'm fat weight that got me kick-started on this challenge!), eating an omni-high protein diet, and drinking like a freakin' fish. i had a bad flu at the beginning of my training season, only trained for about 3 months, and developed runner's knees and patella tendonitis in my right knee. on race day, i had flown all the way across the country by myself, got myself to the race by myself, ran by myself. at mile 13, my period started! i couldn't beleive it! in those days, i was (obviously) having very heavy and uncomfortable cycles, with a lot of IBD on day 1. so i was in and out of the port-o-johns for the next 13 miles with diarrhea and changing out toilet paper pads. to make matters even worse, the sun came out around mile 7 - the SD marathon is supposed to be under cloudy cool skies, but the sun came out and it was a perfect SoCal day, blue skies, 80 degrees, not a cloud to be found. ack! but i finished, damn it. i finished that marathon with every scrap of will that i had, in 5:27:29. and i was proud of myself.

i haven't run much since then. i discovered yoga and running seemed unnecessary, although i've tried to get back into it. but with 811, and living in AUSTIN, perfect running town, and challenging myself on so many levels, this seems like the perfect thing to do. so i'm signing up for SD for next summer. that gives me 11 months to train, 11 months 811. i'm excited to see what's going to happen. my goal is to finish right around the 4 hr mark.

i know i can do it.