Racing towards 26.2

After following along while so many fantastic runners took to the NYC streets yesterday for the ING NYC marathon, thoughts of my own 26.2 plans were not far from my mind. I’m already starting to mull over how I want to approach this ginormous goal of mine — and finding a way to make this marathon training my own.

…making it (26.2) mine is so important to me. 

I fully realize that this is going to be both an incredibly rewarding experience but also an incredibly hard road towards 26.2. The “hard” part I’m totally ready for, but I also want this to be fun. It’s also something my husband feels pretty strongly about — making sure we’re having fun along the way, and not getting too caught up in running and racing and nothing else. <Expect a few more posts on how we plan to approach training for 26.2… there’s just so much I want to say…!>

One way I think we’ll make this whole thing more “fun” is by picking a few really great races to weave into our training plans for next year.

So far, these are just a couple of the ones we’re mulling over — and in some cases, we’re going to have to decide pretty quickly given when registrations open for a few of these! (nothing like planning ahead, right??).

May 27, 2012:  Boston’s Run to Remember — I’ve always wanted to run in Boston and this might be our best shot of doing just that. Plus, this would help us both ‘stay honest’ with our running endurance over the winter months…knowing a half marathon is on the schedule for early-spring and all. And, this would be a great way to officially kick off our marathon training — by running a killer 13.1 (no pressure or anything?!) and starting full training with a nice base to go on.

July 15, 2012: Napa to Sonoma wine country half marathon…remember my “half marathon bucket list” race in Healdsburg I have been dying to run? Well, that one isn’t until late-October which is *after* the Chicago marathon, but this one? It fits *way* too perfectly into our training schedule to not at least consider it. Plus, this would quasi-qualify to me as a bucket list item checked off the list. And it would kind of make up for missing out on the wine country three-peat this past fall. A colleague of mine has run this one twice and LOVED it. C’mon, any race with wine at the hydration stops the last few miles is an *awesome* race in my book. **This one fills up fast (shocker) and registration opens on Nov 15…I’m thinking we just HAVE to do this one, can I get an amen on that??

Hmmm…that’s two “training” races which feels about right. *But* I loved the Green Strides half marathon so much this year that I definitely plan to run it again. The 2012 date hasn’t been announced yet but I’m hoping it’s either earlier this year so I can run it before Chicago…or that it’s later in October so we can run it *after* we run Chicago. Either way, it’s on my 2012 race list ‘fo sho!

Other than that, though, I’m not sure if we’ll sign up for many other races — I sort of want to run a 10k at some point, mostly because I’ve never run that distance in a race before and like the concept of breaking down 26.2 miles into two 10ks and one 5k. So that’s lurking in the back of my mind, too.

But what’s really lurking in the back of my mind? Just how excited I am to run the Chicago Marathon on October 7, 2012 — with my best friend by my side. Racing towards 26.2, having as much fun along the way as we can. We got this babe, yes we do. 🙂