The Shirts Are Bought...

I am proud to say that I am now part of a group of 6 from the Runner's World blogging community that are going to be running the Portland Marathon.

I offered to get us all matching shirts.

Got the shirts today....now need to get the graphics on.

Not sure what I was thinking when I volunteered this little project....

What I didn't realize at the time of this undertaking is what an ordeal this was going to be. I mean, wow! Someone from the blog world offered to let us use this rep from Nike. He turned out to be virtually invisable. I've received two emails from him in the past 5 weeks. Each one ending with, "let me know how I can help." Well, for starters, you could answer my email and phone messages!! Now it's too late to use him and having actually drove myself downtown today to the Niketown store (can I just say that that store has less Nike apparel in it than the Sports Authority store has! What is wrong with that picture!!!) and having seen the shirts we were thinking of going with, I'm glad we didn't get them. After several stores today (and yesterday), I ended up bagging Nike and went with some other wicking shirt from SA and got long sleeved black shirts for the chicks and a short sleeved one for Dave (we have 6 on our team: 5 females, 1 male). I hope everyone is happy - considering we were trying for orange and we now have black. Okay, orange just isn't a prominent color in the running world. Dave, the lone male on the team, has been diligently making the graphics for the shirts, even coming up with an awesome color of hot pink for the logo. Haha. I think not, but thanks Dave for thinking of me :) (picture above). I'm thinking since the whole theme of this marathon is keeping it green, we should use some sort of green hue.!!??!! Just a thought...

Anyway, a major victory (I hope!!??!!) for the shirts for sure. Now it's time to get my body in line with my mind and get this taper on the road and stay strong. I came home from the relay feeling pretty fine - I don't wanna lose it!

So the relay takes the top three places of all those entered on the team and uses those 3 times for placement. For medals and such, if you're lucky enough. There are two females on our team who expect to run about 3:10-3:15. Yeah...me, too. :). I'm not sure I have the sub-3:45 in me but if so, I should be able to crank out a 3rd for the team. Dave is not too far behind and well, the other two females may even give me some competition. But if all pans out according to plan (?), I hope to crank out a sub-3:45. We shall see.....

Yesterday went to the track and cranked out some awesome 800's. Rob had them slated to run em at 3:45. I kept questioning this but he didn't respond so I figured it was either a misprint or that he thought that was all I could do; the week before he wanted me doing 3/4 of a mile at 4:45 (which is a 6:20 mile. Um...like I truly wish!). Numbers were not adding up so I just thought I'd go and do what I could do. 3:33, 3:29, 3:26 and the last one..3:15!! I couldn't believe it - but was super stoked. The best part? My ankle was barely noticeable! Yes! I kept thinking about the pacing I need to do on Friday when I am going to pace an autistic boy on the CC team at school at a meet. His regular pacer told me he clocked this course last year at 21:33. Um, that's really close to my OWN PR. So as not to fail at my job and be fired round 1, I just tried to turn over my legs and see what they can do. I think I can do it; the intervals help me believe so.

Today I did some weight training at the ripe hour of 5:30am. I'm not opposed to this time slot but I think I am just still very tired from the relay weekend. Looking forward to a meeting in the morning and not having to be anywhere until 8a.m. Wow...what a treat! Felt good doing the weights - I'm really ready to start producing a few more defined muscle areas on my arms when I get back from Portland. Ran 5 minutes between each weight session; legs feeling pretty good. GOTTA remember to stretch tomorrow night. For a long time! B and R have a track meet at Laredo so I can do some there while I'm waiting for 3 hours!

BTW, my ankle is doing much better - thanks to those that asked about it.

6.5 miles run

1 weight training

1 super happy person who now has Portland team marathon shirts!