My 3 Day Week in Review

Wow! What a huge week for 3 Day activities!

Fundraising

This was another "in between" week for our team fundraising contests, which usually means it's a down week for me in terms of fundraising.  However, exactly the opposite happened!  I wrapped up the Predict the Oscars contest on Monday, which generated $45 towards my fundraising goals.  On top of that, I also received three incredibly generous donations, bringing my current fundraising totals to $1,195 (not including a check that has yet to post).  That's more than half way to the required $2300 minimum, a milestone that was marked by a very encouraging letter from the 3 Day coaches.  With two more fundraising contests and a planned letter writing campaign, I'm well on my way to meeting all of my fundraising goals!

Special thanks to my three wonderful donors this week:  my incredibly supportive in-laws, Mike and Kathy Cincotta and my good friends Cliff Michaels and Michelle Niescierenko.   I couldn't do this without all of your support!

Training

Training this week also kicked up a notch.  It started with 4 mile make up walk on Monday to catch up after our short trip to New York last weekend.  I also walked an additional 17.34 miles last week, dodging the relentless rain that settled over Atlanta for five straight days.  All told, Shenanigans and I covered 21.94 miles last week, bringing our training totals to 80.86 miles walked to date.  We even did some training at a wonderful new American Cancer Society event called Bark for Life.  You can read all about it and see some pictures from the event here.

In addition to my 3 Day training, I also started training for the Atlanta Race for the Cure this past week.  I'm trying to follow the Couch to 5K program as best as I can fit it in with my 3 Day training.  Because the training runs were pretty short this week, I was able to tack them on to the end of my training walks.  I thought I would be really exhausted doing it this way, but because my muscles were all warmed up from walking, the running was pretty easy.  I guess after walking all those miles, an extra 20 minutes just doesn't seem that scary.  All told, I ran an additional 6.0 miles this week for 27.94 miles of pavement covered in seven days!

Extra Stuff

As promised, I also got to more regular blogging this week, mostly focused on fundraising.  I finally had time to put together a post about using widgets to aid in fundraising that went up on Thursday after more than a week of planning.  There were a number of great comments on that thread that I need to go back and address soon.  I also shared some of my thoughts about the "magic trick" to fundraising and a great story about the power of Conan O'Brien, Twitter and the 3 Day.  Over on our team blog, I also posted an update about our team fundraising so far and some of the extra 3 Day activities that our team members have taken on this year.

Coming Up Next Week...

I was really happy with how things came together last week in terms of balancing 3 Day stuff with my personal life and responsibilities, so hopefully I can continue that this week.  Fundraising this week is going to be primarily focused on our last two team fundraising contests:  March Madness and Fug Madness.  You can find the basics of both contests in this post on our team fundraising blog.  The official post about our March Madness pool, including information about where to submit your brackets, can be found here and the official Fug Madness post should be up later this afternoon.  We are only taking entries for both contests until Thursday morning, so if you are planning on entering, do it soon!  We're hoping for more than 45 entries between the two contests, so please tell everyone you know!

Training for both the 3 Day and the Race for the Cure will continue to get more intense this week as well.  For the 3 Day, the 24 week training schedule calls for 3 and 5 mile walks during the week plus a 6 mile walk on Saturday and a 5 mile walk on Sunday.  In total, that will be 19 miles walked, two more miles than last week.  Couch to 5K training will add three more short runs to the mix which will probably add an extra 6 - 7 miles onto my training.

Blog wise, I am planning to start a series addressing why biomedical research is so expensive.  As I've planned it, that series should consist of four or five posts over the next couple weeks.  Hopefully, it will shed some light on why it's so crucial that we raise all this money for breast cancer research.  In addition to that, the other big thing happening this week is my birthday!  I've got a couple birthday-related things planned including a push for donations on Facebook and most importantly: SHOPPING FOR NEW SNEAKERS!  I can't wait!