Great photo with palm trees and lots of sun, huh? Yes, I’m rubbing it in – for anyone living in piles and piles of snow…. It’s true, I live in sunny Florida but please know that I’m really, really grateful to be away from snow.
Our running season here in Florida basically runs from September to April, whereas for those of you “up north,” your season is about the opposite – April to October. Based on this information, it should mean that when I fly up to my hometown – Cleveland, Ohio – in mid-May that I should be in prime training form, right? Yeah, well that’s not the case but it’s not as awful as that might sound.
What’s different than last year? This year I’m stronger, I’m nearly 35 pounds lighter and I’m ready to take on most any challenge that comes my way – and that includes the Rite Aid Cleveland Marathon Race Series Challenge. If all goes well, I plan on doing the 8K on Saturday, May 19 and then the I plan on doing the half marathon on Sunday, May 20, 2018.
I won’t keep talking about what went wrong last year, but instead, I’ll share a little about what I’m doing: I’m building strength day by day at Elite Fitness & Training studio in Port Charlotte, Florida. Here’s my new workout regime:
* Monday mornings, I run a few miles with my pup, Brodie, in my neigborhood.
* Tuesdays at 5am is Boot Camp at Elite Fitness. They change the areas of the body they focus on regularly, so it is either arm day (aka upper body), leg day (lower body) and ab day so that only one part of your body hurts at a time!
* Wednesdays at 6:30 pm is Boxing Boot Camp at Elite. If it happens to be leg day, they throw a couple million extra squats or some other horrible thing in there so you get your boxing workout AND you can’t walk. It’s a “super fun time” as coach, Dara would say.
* Thursdays is 5am is Boot Camp at Elite again. Same story as Tuesdays – see above.
* Fridays is 5:30 pm Zumba at Elite. Before anyone starts laughing, let me tell you I burn so many calories doing Zumba that I’d be crazy to NOT do Zumba. Plus I always have so much fun!
Sometimes I run on Saturdays, but it hasn’t been consistent at all. That’s where the plan falls through the cracks since this is the run that I should have been increasing the mileage on all along. Once I ran 5 miles and another time I ran a little over 7, but if I’m trying to do something awesome with 13.1 miles in Cleveland, I need to get some mileage building going.
The good news is that I still have a little over a month to put some miles on the books, so I had better get to work right? I’ll keep you posted, but in the meantime, why don’t you head over to the Rite Aid Cleveland Marathon Race Series Challenge and sign up for a race or two! If you use my official ambassador code, you can save 10% off your registration fee!! Here’s the code: DLCLE10. Now go sign up.
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