It begins again...

A little less than two months since Grandma's marathon in Duluth, I'm choosing to begin this journey on more time. Only this time there are a few differences. 

This time I'm only going for half. Training starts tomorrow with a two mile run. I've recruited a few friends to train for the Haunted Hustle Middleton the day before halloween. I hope we can all stick together through training and finish this half in style! Costumes? Probably. I've modified the runner's world half-marathon training to accomodate true beginners. I feel like a beginner right now, really. I hope you're ready girls!

I probably should have shot for a half marathon first, then gone for the full afterwards but I've been known to do things a little differently at times. 

Here's a little catchup from the last couple months:

My marathon went well, but training was somewhat lonely and 26.2 miles is a long way. I finished in 4:37, only seven minutes over my goal.

 I would have uploaded more pictures, but all of them were taken by my boyfriend, Nick, who ended up losing all his belongings in an apartment fire a couple weeks later.

Thankfully nobody was hurt, but my pictures haven't been salvaged. I quit running for three weeks after that. I had a recurring pain in my left foot that wouldn't let me run more than a mile at a time. I lost a little motivation during that little break. An accellerated summertime calculus class kept me busy and too stressed out to run as well.

I'm not a fan of calculus, I must say. It didn't end well.

After that disaster, and a good long healing period, I started to run again. Next came Tough Mudder Wisconsin.

 I had a pretty hard time training for this one. I took a weight training class at school to help prepare. 

 I was only able to run short distances at a time because of my injured foot, but I rode my bike almost every day. I figured I could handle it with minimal training. After all, I had just run a marathon, I could do anything. Ten miles seemed like nothing.

 It was the obstacles that made it both fun, and almost impossible at the same time.

 There was nothing that could have prepared me for those hills. It was four miles of straight up and down hills. These weren't gently rolling hills mind you, these were brutal, better walk on the way down or you might break a leg, hills. Double black diamond ski hills, the kind you don't attempt on skis. 

So, that's some of what's been going on in my life lately.