My 3 Day Week in Review!

Phew!  That was a busy week that culminated in A LOT of walking this weekend!

Fundraising

The primary development on the fundraising front this week was the announcement of our newest fundraiser for Relentless Optimism: Tastefully Simple!  You can read about all the details of that fundraiser over on our team blog in this post.  Briefly, we are hosting an online "party" where everyone can purchase Tastefully Simple products.  My teammate Jen will also be hosting an in house tasting party as part of this fundraiser.  We will be taking orders both online and in person until May 31st.  At the completion of the sale, our team will receive 50% of the seller's profits to put towards our team fundraising goals for the Susan G. Komen 3 Day for the Cure.  Please check out our sale today and get yourself some yummy treats while helping to support Relentless Optimism!

Beyond starting up the Tastefully Simple sale, I didn't get as much done fundraising-wise as I had planned.  I was mainly hoping to get my fundraising letters out this past week, which didn't happen due to lack of time.  I will be writing those later today, so I am optimistic that I will get some more donations next week.  Because I didn't get any direct donations this week, my fundraising total still stands at $1800.

Training

Training this week happened almost entirely in the span of 48 hours between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.  All of that training this weekend was highlighted by two big breast cancer awareness events: the Atlanta Race for the Cure on Saturday morning and the Breast Cancer Network of Strength Walk to Empower on Sunday morning.  I wrote about each of those events on this blog already, so I won't go into the details about them again here.  Suffice it to say, it was refreshing to integrate these events into my usual 3 Day training and to FINALLY run in my race!  I even had a personal best in the Race for the Cure which was the highlight of my training this week. By the way, that's me feeling sweaty but happy after the Race for the Cure on Saturday in the photo to the right.

Beyond those two events, I also did all of my regular 3 Day walking plus two training runs before the race.  This week, I ended up walking 30.1 miles and running another 9.8 miles.  That puts my mileage to date at 276.73 miles walked and 67 miles run.  I'm getting stronger all every week, although my sore legs this morning are reminding me that it's not a good idea at this point to walk 26.2 miles (the length of a marathon!) AND run a 5K in a single 48 hour period.  We'll save that kind of madness for the 3 Day event, thank you very much.

Extra Stuff

As promised, I got back into the swing of things blog-wise this past week after being relatively quiet for the two weeks before that.  I didn't get to post everything I was hoping to, but I did get to a lot of it, including doing two You're Invited posts about the Race for the Cure and the Walk to Empower.

Most of my blog action this week actually took place over on the Relentless Optimism team blog, since we had a huge week as a team!  First and foremost, we introduced not one but two new teammates this week.  Jen's Uncle Doug decided to join his brother Tommy on the Crew for the Boston 3 Day and we successfully recruited our friend Maria to walk as part of Relentless Optimism after learning that she was planning to walk in Boston by herself.  So our little team has now grown to 6 walkers and 3 crew members!  In addition to adding team members, we also took huge strides in our team fundraising this week.  I posted an update about it here, although those totals are already outdated with the addition of Maria.  We have actually raised $6475 so far, equal to about 32% of our goal.  We still have money coming in from our Flower Power fundraiser and our Amazon Ads as well.  Add to that our new Tastefully Simple fundraiser that we just launched this week and a few other things coming up in the future and I think we are in good shape to make our new team goal of $20,000 by the end of July!

Finally, I spent some time yesterday writing a series of posts about Mother's Day on both our team blog and here on Kristen Walks.  I posted about our Mag Moms over on our team blog in this post and I gave a special shout out to my three teammates that are Moms here on my blog in this post.  Finally, I shared some thoughts about my own mom and how she has truly inspired my involvement in the 3 Day in this post which I would love for everyone to read.

Coming Up Next Week...

The biggest thing that didn't get done last week was getting my fundraising letters out.  That is up next on my to do list today, so that will absolutely be getting done this week.  I am also working on something else on the team fundraising front that I would love to get done this week but until I know for sure that I'm doing it, I'm going to keep the specifics of it quiet.

Training this week will again take me to another cancer awareness event.  I will be participating in my second Relay for Life event in two months on Friday night, this time in Decatur.  I'm hoping to complete  a 13 mile training walk at that event.  Expect posts and pictures about that next weekend.  I will also be sticking to the rest of the 24 week training schedule which calls for 4 and 5 mile walks during the week and 13 and 9 mile walks over the weekend.  Like I said, the 13 mile walk will be at the Relay for Life, but the rest will be out on the sidewalks like usual.  I am also rewarding myself with a day off from running on Tuesday, but with the 10K Peachtree Road Race looming in less than two months, I need to stick with my running as well.  So that will take the form of two 3 mile runs this week (instead of the usual 3 runs) before I start stretching myself out next week.

Finally, I will be posting my recap from the 2007 Atlanta 3 Day event this week along with more advice - based post about socks, similar to this post about sneakers that I posted a while back.  Exciting stuff this week for sure!