Saturday, May 19, 2012

My Next Goal


I cannot believe that more than two months have passed since my first marathon!  Since then I have ran 5 races (3 10ks and 2 5ks).


The picture from April 29th shows just how crazy I am!  When people asked me, “Why are you wearing a mask?”  I answered, “Why not?!”  Wearing a Lucha mask while running, may now be checked off my bucket list.

Now I find myself preparing for the next big step… ending my time living in foreign countries and heading home, back to California.  These last two years in Mexico have been incredible.  I am returning a completely different person than who left Cali in August 2010.  If you haven’t done so already, you should read about my “journey” here… http://runstrongrun.blogspot.mx/2012/03/journey.html

There are only a mere 33 days left here in Mexico until I depart on June 21st.  As I am preparing, I have already started looking ahead at the next physical challenges I may tackle in Cali.  One event in particular has caught my eye.  This event is the Nike Women’s Marathon (NWM) in San Francisco, California on October 14th.  Yes, I loved my first marathon on March 4th so much, that I am itching to complete my second.

I am excited about the NWM for several reasons:

      1)   How empowering to know that I will be one of 25,000 women who will all be tackling the same challenge.  It is all thanks to Katherine Switzer, the first woman to officially enter and run the Boston Marathon in 1967.  It was long believed that if women ran the marathon distance their uterus would fall out!  How absurd is this?!  I, along with 25,000 other women, will confidently run on the 14th of October knowing that our uterus is safe. 

      2)      I’m running a marathon in my home state!  Going from Torreon to San Francisco will be a welcomed challenge.  I’ll be going from a flat, dry desert to a hilly, moist bay area.  What’s awesome is this race will be close enough to my hometown that my family and friends will be able to come and cheer me on.  

      3)      For the first time I will train and complete this race on a team.  This team is called Team In Training.  I will be training and racing while raising funds for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society whose mission is to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families.  My goal is to raise $2,500.  This may seem like a lot, but I know that through my many awesome family members and friends it will be possible to achieve this amount and even exceed it.

Please go to my fundraising page and consider making a donation.  Every little bit is appreciated.  (If you donate $50 or more, your name will appear on my shirt the day of the race.) http://pages.teamintraining.org/sac/nikesf12/strongwells