Start time: 5/31/03, 7:00am

Location: W&OD Trail

Activity: Running

Distance: 7 miles

Run:Walk ratio: 3:1

Average pace: 14:00min/mile

Another week, another progress report… big thanks this week to my grandmother Ruth Spinelli, who became my latest donor while I was up visiting her in Pennsylvania over the weekend. Thanks so very much!

It’s amazing how a bad week can radically change someone’s attitude. If you’d asked me how I was feeling about this year’s training yesterday, the truth is that I wasn’t feeling terribly positive about it. After last Saturday’s run, sitting in a car for four hours was not one of the best things I could’ve done for my legs. By the time we arrived in Pennsylvania my calves were feeling stiff and sore, something they shouldn’t have been doing after just a six-miler. Even worse, I wasn’t able to shake the soreness; I went running on Monday evening after I got back home, and I had to quit halfway through because it felt like I hadn’t run in years.

All week long, I was trying to loosen up my legs and get back up to speed, with both crosstraining and just plain old walking. Add in strange shifting weather patterns and my joints were hurting on and off with no rhyme or reason. (Bizarrely, so were Julie’s, making us decide that it was the fault of the weather.) Even as late as Friday night, though, I wasn’t feeling good about it all. I was quietly thinking to myself that if this kept up, I’d have to seriously re-evaluate my decision to do the marathon this year.

So this morning when the alarm went off at 5am, I was not in the most pleasant of moods. I hauled myself to the run site, we split into two smaller groups, and headed out into the (thankfully not very hot) humidity… and a funny thing happened. Everything seemed to finally snap back into place. I didn’t have any problems at all with my legs or any body part. Maybe all I needed was a nice long run to finally get back to speed, but the seven-miler flew by really quickly, and our group (me, Julie, Asha, Lindsay, and Mary) did a great job of hitting all of our time goals.

Needless to say, I’ve made sure to keep everything moving today since then, and so far so good. Sometimes, it seems, all you have to do is not give up and it’ll all work out in the end.